Cape Town, Saldanha lure oil firms
23 April 2003
A South African delegation is heading for Houston, Texas in a bid to win lucrative contracts for the Cape Town and Saldanha harbours to service the booming west African oil industry.
According to Business Day, the mission has been organised by the Cape Town Regional Chamber of Commerce and Industry and comprises 15 businessmen and industrialists, as well as delegates from the National Ports Authority, the Western Cape province, the City of Cape Town and the national department of trade and industry.
The delegation will be focusing on the Offshore Technology Conference 2003, one of the most influential events in the upstream oil industry. Cape Town has booked its own stand in the exhibition area.
"The thrust of the delegation's message is that Cape Town and Saldanha harbours are well placed to service the drilling rigs and floating production platforms operating off the west coast of Africa", Chris van Gass writes in Business Day. "In
addition, South Africa has the engineering expertise and other resources to provide a world-class service.
"The city is already servicing oil rigs and service vessels, and it was estimated last year that the oil fields off west Africa were sustaining about 5 000 jobs in South Africa."
The oil industry consumes vast quantities of supplies, most of which are being flown in to west Africa from the US and Europe, at great expense. "Add to that corruption problems in west Africa and one can see why Cape Town, with its sophisticated banking and communications systems, is well placed to become a service hub to the industry", writes Van Gass.
The US gets about 15% of its oil from west Africa, but plans to increase this to 25% over the next decade. And with the civil war ended in Angola, exploration and production in the Angola oil fields is increasing: the country produces nearly one million barrels a day, and is expected to double this in the next few
years.
According to Business Day, Cape Town, with several major marine engineering projects successfully completed, is starting to gain the confidence of oil companies.
South Africa's own upstream oil and gas industry comprises a small producing oilfield off the south-east coast, and a nearby gasfield which provides the raw materials for the Mossgas synthetic fuels plant at Mossel Bay.
A gasfield has also been discovered off South Africa's west coast, and exploration continues in a number of offshore areas. There are also plans to pipe gas to Gauteng, the country's industrial heartland, from Mozambique and Namibia.
SA is a world leader in the production of synthetic fuels from coal and gas - about a third of the country's liquid fuels demand is met by synfuels produced locally - and also supplies fuel products to most of sub-Saharan Africa.
Cape Town will be hosting the Africa Upstream and Africa Downstream 2003 conferences in October, while
Johannesburg has won the bid to host the 18th World Petroleum Congress - the "Olympics of oil gatherings" - in 2005.
SouthAfrica.info reporter
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