The National Petroleum Corporation of Namibia (Namcor) is currently in the hunt for oil blocks in Angola and Nigeria as the company seeks to aggressively grow its portfolio and play a bigger role in the upstream side of the oil business, Managing Director Immanual Mulunga has announced.
He said the government-owned company was part of a consortium that recently bid for some oil blocks in Angola, while some opportunities are also being explored in Nigeria.
“We are one of the companies that has bid for some equity in some of the oil blocks in Angola. In two weeks’ time, I will be in Luanda with my consortium to see if we can land one or two or three blocks there. Two weeks ago I was in Nigeria and in two to three weeks we will be back there, to see what we can do about some of the assets there that are being diversified by companies such as Shell,” he told the recently held Africa Energy Week Conference.
“We made a conscious decision of looking outside Namibia, looking at Angola and Nigeria to see if we can acquire some oil producing assets over there. We are quite confident we will get something. We are aggressively going on the upstream side.”
Mulunga said he was very optimistic about Namibia’s prospects of discovering oil.
“We have been very busy doing a lot of exploration work in Namibia. So far no luck, but we believe we are going to be the next country that will discover oil in Africa, absolutely no doubt about that,” he said.
“I am the only person coming from a country which is a non-oil producer, but I believe we belong in that league and it’s just a matter of time that we become a petroleum producer ourselves. If there is anyone who is going to bet against us with regards to a discovery, they are going to make a very bad bet. We will be back next year to announce not only a discovery and that Namcor has taken a position in Angola or it will be Nigeria.”
He said the exploration activity being carried out by Recon Africa in the Kavango,an exploration company in which it holds a 10% stake , was an exciting development for the company.
“There is exploration happening in Namibia and this year is going to be an interesting year for us. We have our colleagues from Recon Africa who are doing some good exploration activities in the Kavango basin. We are looking forward to their drilling activities that are going to happen in the next 2-3 months and look forward to the results. Total and Shell are going to drill in the Orange basin next month and we are looking forward to that,” the Namcor MD said.
On the downstream side, Mulunga said Namcor was targeting to disrupt the Namibian fuel retail sector.
“We started about three years ago and have 11 service stations now and next year at this time (November) we should have about 20. We are fortunate enough that we play in the upstream and downstream sector in the oil business. We have made a decision to secure our future sustainability by growing our downstream footprint and also play our role in the upstream sector,” he said.
Namibia’s fuel retail sector is currently dominated by the likes of Puma, Shell, Engine and Total.
