SNH reports revenues from Chad-Cameroon pipeline up in 11M-2020

Société Nationale des Hydrocarbures (SNH), the national oil company (NOC) of Cameroon, said earlier this week that it had seen earnings from crude oil shipments through the Chad-Cameroon pipeline rise in the first 11 months of 2020.

During the January-November period, SNH reported, Cameroon’s government collected XAF33.48bn ($61.42mn) in transit fees for the oil flowing through the link. This represents a 2% rise on the same period of the previous year, when transit fees totalled XAF32.82bn ($44.79mn), it noted.

It also stated that the volume of crude oil exported from Cameroon via the Kome-Kribi terminal, a floating storage and off-loading (FSO) vessel anchored in the Gulf of Guinea near the port of Kribi, had reached 44.72mn barrels (about 133,493 barrels per day) in the first 11 months of last year. This marks a 3% increase on the figure of 43.42mn barrels (129,604 bpd) posted in the same period of 2019, they stated.

The NOC attributed the rise in revenues and delivery volumes to improved upstream performance. “This increase in DT [transit fees] is due to the increase in production of new crude oil shippers from Chad,” it said.

It identified the new shippers in question as PétroChad Mangara, an affiliate of Vitol, an international commodities trading firm; CNPC International Chad, a subsidiary of state-run China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC); and Overseas Private Investment Corp. (OPIC), a US government development finance entity that is now part of US International Development Finance Corp. (IDFC). These three entities accounted for fully 71% of the crude flowing through the pipeline during the January-November period, it said. They have been supplying an increasingly larger share of total throughput since 2014, when the US-Malaysian consortium set up by ExxonMobil, Chevron and Petronas began to see output levels decline at the Doba fields in Chad, it added.

The Chad-Cameroon pipeline follows a 1,070-km route from south-western Chad to the Kome-Kribi FSO. It was built by ExxonMobil under a public-private partnership agreement and began operating in 2003, before the US super-major’s exit from Chad. The link is operated by Cameroon Oil Transportation Co. (COTCO) and has a throughput capacity of 225,000 bpd.

During the first eight years of the pipeline’s operations, SNH collected a yearly transit fee of XAF85.5bn ($116.69mn) for oil shipments along the Chad-Cameroon route. However, it was able to negotiate a higher fee in 2013, and another increase followed in 2018.