According to the council statement, “The drilling carried out (by Sonatrach) on the Kafra block between December 2017 and February 2018 has confirmed the existence of a new oil basin on the Niger-Algeria border.”

The Council of Ministers has “approved” an amendment to the Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) signed in August 2015, which will include an “estimate of the reserves” and “determine the additional quantities to discover” for “the release into production deposits of this new zone”.

In 2005, Sonatrach was awarded a prospecting license in Kafra, which became a PSA in 2015.

In April, the Algerian public oil group said it had made an “encouraging discovery” of oil in Kafra, a vast 23 737 km2, bordering Tafassasset, a bloc on the Algerian side also operated by Sonatrach.

Niger, a very poor country, became a modest oil producer in 2011. To increase its production of black gold, currently equal to only 20 000 barrels/day, Niamey recently signed an agreement to exploit a second oil well with the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), in the Agadem (southeastern Niger), where this company has been extracting oil since 2011.

The exploitation of the new well will start maximum at the end of 2018 and will allow Niger to produce an additional 90 000 barrels a day, thus reaching a “global production of 110 000 barrels per day”, said Foumakoye Gado, the Nigerian Minister of Petroleum.

The minister also announced that at the end of 2018, construction work of a pipeline will begin to evacuate to Cameroon, via Chad, its crude oil for export.