(Bloomberg) – Namibia and TotalEnergies are still negotiating terms for the development of the French major’s Venus oil discovery, leaving less time to meet a target of first production by 2030.
Total in April said it was aiming for a final investment decision this year, though talks with the government remain unresolved. The company had previously targeted 2025 for sanctioning the project.
The discussions are continuing,Kornelia Shilunga, special adviser and head of the upstream petroleum unit in the Namibian Presidency confirmed in an interview. She declined to say whether an investment decision was likely this year. “That’s a question for Total,” she said.
Total Chief Executive Officer Patrick Pouyanné last month said he’s “optimistic everybody wants” the project to proceed and the company was working toward that goal in the coming months. A spokesperson referred to those remarks when asked for comment on Tuesday.
After initial discoveries by TotalEnergies and Shell, the waters offshore the southern African nation have become an exploration hotspot on the continent. bp, Chevron and other international oil majors have piled into oil blocks there.
Namibia, with a population of about 3 million, will become an oil producer for the first time once development is complete. That’s taking time and pushed aspirations of pumping crude by the end of the decade to potentially starting later in the 2030s.
“When you go into a new country that doesn’t have a hydrocarbon history, there’s a lot of learning to be done by the local authorities, by the national oil company,” Mike Sangster, a senior vice president at Total, said Oct. 12 at a conference in Cape Town, without identifying a specific country.
“It really helps as well to have a quick decision-making process in the host country so that we can move ahead at the right pace, avoid too much time to take FID, finalize regulations fiscal systems and so on,” he said.
Total has a significant presence offshore Namibia and uses the port of Luderitz as a base. It plans to make a decision on developing the Mopane discovery, located in another block, by 2028. Venus is expected to produce about 160,000 bopd.
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