Oil and gas Plant
Yaounde, Cameroon Africa(Cameroon News) – Victoria is all geared up to flag off gas production in Cameroon.
The political stability and high literacy rate of Cameroon makes it the right destination for foreign companies to put together their money on a long term in comparison to other neighbors. One such shining example is Victoria Oil & Gas for whom investing in Cameroon has made the future brighter.
VOG joined the Alternative Investment Market in 2004 and put its money on oil exploration projects in Siberia. But three years ago, chairman Kevin Foo had an inkling that not just Russia would be enough and it was time that they explored other pastures.
He started scouting the globe for the right destination and decided that it would be a gas field in Cameroon not too far from the country’s largest city, Douala. They were able to find out that within close proximity of the country’s business capital is a huge gas field, that was located by the French in the Fifties but ignored because they were scouting for oil, and gas was not in demand back then.
But that is not the case now and what was a lost opportunity for the French is now bread and butter for Foo and his men. Foo has been turning the oil field into a commercially viable prospect in the past three years. He is now morphed from being an explorer to a producer what with having drilled wells, put in place pipelines and executed all necessary contracts and appeased all key decision makers. By determination and hard work Foo and his team have achieved their dreams but in the process have tested the patience of their stakeholders with repeated requests for investments in the past two years.
Now the company is just days away from its first gas sales. It has been able to sign sales deals valid for five years with more than ten customers and there are lot more prospects in the pipeline. The target businesses are those who require a lot of imported oil and diesel at the moment, which requires them to shell out 30 per cent to 40 per cent more cash than what they would require to pay for Foo’s energy contracts. The results would be less eco friendly and less sustainable than Foo’s locally extracted natural gas.
VOG expects to commence gas sales by the end of the year and initial production is estimated at eight million cubic feet a day, increasing gradually to about 44 million day by 2014 (equivalent to 7,300 barrels of oil a day). These numbers come at a stage when the company has undertaken detailed exploration of just about ten per cent of its gas field in Cameroon, which indicates the huge potential and scope that the project holds for not just Foo but also Cameroon in the future.
The government is not alien to the fact that the future is ripe for VOG and is more than happy to offer their whole hearted support. The government is also fostering hopes that if the project takes off a s planned then both businesses and consumers can look at gas as their major source of power in the coming years relying lesser and lesser on fossil fuels and other non renewable sources of energy.
VOG shares are priced at 4.03p and is not exactly at their highest in days since there have been better times for them. This could be an indication that investors are apprehensive about whether the company would be really able to keep up to their promises of delivering gas to their customers by end of this year. But as the day for sales gets closer, Foo and his team are totally focused to make sure that nothing goes wrong with their plans this time.
