Chad-CameroonPetroleumDevProject

In the last month the Canadian oil company Griffith (now re-named Caracal), which was recently involved in a bribery scandal involving the wife of the Chadian ambassador to Canada, successfully started drilling at the Badila fields in southern Chad in old wells previously deemed unprofitable by Esso. A number of other oil companies, including Simba Oil and Global Oil, have also registered an interest in concessions.

Bodies such as the EITI and the Chadian civil society Grampt-tc (Alternative Group for Monitoring the Petrol Project – Chad) are doing excellent work to make sure that a proper record of the ten billion dollars is kept, but even the head of Grampt-tc admits that many Chadians have lost interest in the oil project because “nothing seems to have changed”.

Although China is the prime buyer for the Congolese Djeno crude as well as for the Equatoguinean Zafiro, the future plans of Chinese companies are looking to the north of the Gulf of Guinea. China’s latest project is the Niger-Benin crude pipeline, a 1982km conduit that would create a new shipping outlet for crude produced by Chinese companies in Niger and Chad, simultaneously linking Niger to the existing Chad-Cameroon pipeline.

The Niger-Benin pipeline has been in the makings since 2012, as CNPC’s first discoveries have compelled the regional authorities to think big and find export outlets for any incremental volumes.

Boko Haram and an increasingly weaker state in Cameroon notwithstanding (both are perfectly legitimate reasons to shirk it), the prime reason to go for the costlier option lied in CNPC actually being able to do what it wants. Were it to opt to tie its Niger fields to the Chad-Cameroon pipeline which runs all the way to the port of Kribi, it would only have third-party access in that pipeline as it is operated by ExxonMobil, which co-owns it with Chevron and Petronas.