News

October 07, 2009

Gasol Making Steady Progress On Its West Africa LNG Ambitions But Funding Remains An Issue

The monetisation of West Africa’s vast but largely dormant gas resources has long-proved problematic. For many decades, explorers who found gas wrote off the well as a dry hole because there was little or no market for the stuff. More recently, Big Oil, often under pressure from host governments, has invested mega-bucks in liquefaction plants to extract value from the associated gas that accompanies their giant oilfields. But this still leaves many smaller deposits of stranded gas that are too small or disparate for the majors to incorporate in their LNG schemes.

This is where AIM-quoted Gasol comes in. This small company with limited cash resources is hoping to succeed where so many others have failed: namely in monetising stranded gas assets in the Gulf of Guinea, either by aggregation, liquefaction and shipment of LNG to high-value markets worldwide, or by domestic commercialisation projects to supply methanol, fertiliser or power plants.  Gasol reckons there are 641 fields with 0.5 to 1 trillion cubic feet of gas and 668 fields with 0.25...