South Sudan’s oil minister on Thursday announced the country has discovered new oil well in the northern parts of the country, reported Reuters. This is the first oil discovery since the east African country gained independence from Sudan eight years ago in 2011 when exploration was interrupted due to war and instability.
Petroleum minister Awow Daniel Chuang said the new field in the Adar area of the state contains 5.3 million barrels of recoverable oil. The new oil well was discovered by Dar Petroleum Operating Company (DOPC), a consortium of several firms that include China National Petroleum Corporation, Malaysia’s Petronas, Nilepet, Sinopec and India’s Tri-Ocean Energy.
“Production is likely to begin towards the end of the year,” Chuang told a news conference. “As of now, we are very excited … within some few weeks, exploration will be taken as a priority. We are going to move all over South Sudan.”
Notably, South Sudan has the third-largest oil reserves in sub-Saharan Africa, estimated at 3.5 billion barrels and much of the reserves being unexplored. With oil accounting for around 60 percent of its gross domestic product, the East African country is the most oil-dependent nation in the world.
After South Sudan plunged into civil war in late 2013, its oil production declined from 350,000 in 2011 to less than 130,000 barrels per day in 2014 amid soaring inflation. But, following the signing of a new peace deal in September 2018 and reopening of closed oilfields, the landlocked country is hoping to raise daily output to over 200,000 barrels per day by the end of 2019.
The petroleum minister said the government would scale up efforts of oil search in other parts of the country in a bid to increase the country’s production levels.
“This is the beginning of an era in our oil exploration activities because the geology of South Sudan has a lot of oil,” Chuang said. “Any addition, whether it is big or small, we will have a slight improvement in our oil production,” he added.
