The Ethiopian Ministry of Mines signed an agreement with an American firm, Netherland, Sewell & Associates, Inc. to conduct a study of the oil and natural gas resource potential and economic assessment of 3,500 square kilometers of land at Ogaden, Somali Regional State.
The study will be carried out based on previous explorations and research.
The agreement is signed by Takele Uma, Minister of the Ministry of Mines and representative of Netherlands Sewell & Associates Inc. Chargé d’affaires of the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa, Tracey Ann Jacobson and other delegates of the company were also in attendance.
Netherland, Sewell & Associates, Inc. (NSAI), established in 1961, is a worldwide petroleum consultant well known within the oil & gas and financial community. It has conducted reserve certifications, technical studies, economic evaluation, and advisory work for both offshore and onshore fields in over 100 countries.
The government of Ethiopia announced in June 2018 that it will begin extracting crude oil on a test basis from reserves in the Ogaden area that followed Poly-GCL Petroleum Investment Limited, a joint venture of state-owned China POLY Group Corporation and Hong Kong-based Golden Concord Group, to officially starting crude oil production test in the region.
The government at the time said that “the company has discovered that there is a prospect of commercial quantities of crude oil in the region. It is projected to earn up to 8 billion US dollars annually once it begins exporting natural gas with its full capacity.”
The Ogaden Basin is an area claimed to have significant reserves of crude oil and natural gas. The basin covers an area of some 350,000 square kilometers. The first exploration in the basin was undertaken by Standard Oil in 1920. More recent exploration by Tenneco resulted in the discovery of an estimated 68 million cubic meters of gas in 1974.
