South Sudan Courts Oil Investors as Sudan’s Warring Forces Take Their Share

Résumé détaillé

South Sudan is courting fresh capital for 14 exploration blocks and a production increase from roughly 170,000 barrels per day to 230,000, which investors would find impossible to control once those barrels left the country.

Alex Kimani is a veteran finance writer, investor, engineer and researcher for Safehaven.com.

South Sudan is courting fresh capital for 14 exploration blocks and a production increase from roughly 170,000 barrels per day to 230,000, which investors would find impossible to control once those barrels left the country. Captive to neighboring Sudan’s civil war, South Sudan is essentially divvying up its oil, under duress, between the Sudanese Army and the rival paramilitary RSF, which extract payment before the oil can reach the Red Sea. The government-backed South Sudan Oil & Power conference will put that proposition before investors in Juba at the end of the month, and its organizers place current production at 170,000 barrels per day, describing 230,000 bpd as a short-term target.

Tanker tracking recorded eight cargoes carrying 4.8 million barrels from Sudan’s two Red Sea terminals in October, equivalent to combined Sudanese and South Sudanese exports of 155,000 bpd. Sudan’s Heglig fields were producing about 26,000 bpd in September, all of it sent for export, according to Sudan Tribune. Public data provide no current country breakdown and no reconciliation between South Sudan’s reported wellhead production and the volumes loaded at the Red Sea terminals.

Juba’s lofty ambitions in the middle of the civil war in Sudan, which has effectively hijacked its exports, are an attempt to ride the tailwinds of the launch of the Africa Energy Bank. Afreximbank and the African Petroleum Producers’ Organisation formally established the institution in Abuja on October 31 with $5 billion in authorized capital. APPO Secretary-General Farid Ghezali said the bank had raised $500 million for deployment and would begin making investment decisions.

Fresh capital can finance production inside South Sudan, but it can’t secure passage through Sudan. Crude from Blocks 1, 2 and 4 enters the Greater Nile pipeline through Heglig in West Kordofan, where Sudan’s paramilitary RSF displaced the…

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