Ghana National Petroleum Corp., the state-owned oil explorer, said it had an “understanding” with Kosmos Energy LLC to buy the company’s Ghanaian assets before a deal was announced last month with Exxon Mobil Corp.

Ghana National Petroleum, also known as GNPC, is still in talks with Kosmos over the assets and has the money ready for the purchase, Managing Director Nana Boakye Asafu-Adjaye said in an interview yesterday in Tema, about 30 kilometers (19 miles) east of the capital, Accra.

Kosmos said on Oct. 12 it agreed to sell a 23 percent stake in Ghana’s Jubilee oil field to Exxon.

In talks over the stake, “we felt that Kosmos didn’t handle it in a way that things should have been handled,” Asafu-Adjaye said. “We have informed Kosmos about the way we feel about that, that we had an understanding.” Negotiations with Kosmos are continuing, he said. “We are still talking.”

Ghana has attracted attention from the world’s biggest energy companies as it seeks to become an oil exporter. The Jubilee field has potential resources of 1.8 billion barrels of oil. BP Plc, Europe’s second-largest oil company, may bid for the stake and has hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to advise it on the sale, two people familiar with the matter said on Oct. 22.

China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., the company known as Sinopec, may also bid for the stake, Sebastian Spio-Garbrah, an Africa analyst at New York-based Eurasia Group, said on Nov. 16.

Partnership

GNPC may look for a partner after acquiring the stakes. BP has held talks with GNPC about a potential joint offer, the people said, adding that no decision has been made, two people familiar with the matter said last month.

“Companies are talking to us all the time,” Asafu-Adjaye said, declining to name any specific companies.

Ghana’s Energy Ministry said on Oct. 14 that the government had held talks with Chinese oil executives. There has been contact with Cnooc Ltd., the listed arm of state-controlled China National Offshore Oil Corp., spokesman Michael Sarpong said. Cnooc said on Nov. 13 Ghana blocked the company from making a bid.

Asafu-Adjaye said talks are also continuing to try to resolve a dispute in which GNPC says Kosmos violated the Jubilee petroleum agreement, signed in July, by allowing companies interested in the purchase to see data on the site.

Production at Jubilee is expected to begin in late 2010. Initial output will be 120,000 barrels a day, doubling by 2013, Asafu-Adjaye said. How the Kosmos sale is managed may set the precedent for future deals in Ghana’s oil industry, he said.

Regulations

“We want to ensure the right thing is done and that the laws and regulations that are guiding companies are adhered to,” he said.

The sale of the Jubilee assets would include Kosmos’s shares in two other oil fields. Asafu-Adjaye said appraisal wells are being drilled at Odum and Mahogany Deep. No-one at Exxon Mobil was available for comment when Bloomberg News called the company’s head office in Irving, Texas today.

Development at Jubilee is “on track,” he said. The floating production, storage and offloading facility being constructed in Singapore is 70 percent complete and three oil rigs are on site.

Tullow Oil Plc owns 34.7 percent of Jubilee and is the operator of the field. Anadarko Petroleum Corp. controls 23.49 percent; Sabre Oil & Gas has 2.81 percent and EO Group 1.75 percent. GNPC holds 13.75 percent.

Source: Bloomberg

Tags: exxon, ghana oil, kosmos