MOGADISHU (Halbeeg News) – Somalia is neither technically ready nor transparent enough to move in a predictable direction under an accountable leadership, which will contradict new bid round for Somalia, the Permanent Secretary of Somalia’s ministry of Petroleum said.
Abdirashid Mohamed Ahmed, Minister of Petroleum early this month announced that Somalia was going to be holding the first licensing rounds of multiple acreages early next year.
In a statement following an earlier statement by the minister, Jamal Qasim Mursal said the country is not a position to issue license saying the capacity of the ministry’s staff is not adequate to undertake and award new contracts, whether through bid rounds or direct negotiations.
“Up to the present, there is no qualified and trained negotiation Team/Committee that can handle negotiations and protect the interest of Somalia in producing a fair deal/contract with the International Oil Companies. As you are aware in 2016 Africa Oil Week event in South Africa, the ministry announced bid rounds that was planned to be held in 2017 but under your leadership all the said milestones were not achieved due to lack of plan and clear strategic direction and as a result the bid round could not go ahead and nothing much,” said Jamal.
The permanent secretary has underlined the need for the approval of the Petroleum Act which sets forth the regulatory mechanisms and institutions vested with regulating the oil sector. The Petroleum Amendment Act which was tabled in the Lower House in October 30, 2017, is currently at the Committee stage.
The remarks of the secretary general of the ministry, Jamal comes barely a week after the minister said Somalia is gearing for its first post-civil war oil drilling licensing rounds early February following completion of seismic surveys by two exploration companies.
“In preparation for the offshore licensing round, Spectrum has completed acquisition and processing of 20,185 km of 2D long-offset seismic data, following a co-operation agreement with the Federal Government of Somalia. This program complements 20,500 km of existing seismic data that was acquired in 2014,” the statement read in part.
According to the minister, the survey design, which covers water depths of 30 m to 4,000 m has allowed for seismic coverage over the shelf, slope and basin floor with dip, strike and recording time intervals suitable for defining a range of leads and prospects.
The minister said streamer lengths of 10,050 m have been used to adequately record information at all offsets, further assisting imaging of the underlying syn-rift geometries.
Modern processing algorithms were applied to the raw data to achieve optimal imaging of steeply-dipping extensional and compression features and illumination of subtle amplitude anomalies.
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