Fresh doubt has been cast over Senegal’s ability to proceed on time with an already announced deep-water licensing round first mooted in 2018 in which it proposed to offer 12 as-yet-unspecified blocks under open tender.

Having missed an October deadline when President Macky Sall was due to reveal the line-up, the launch was put back to 4 November.

This coincides with the Africa Oil Week conference in Cape Town, but Minister of Petroleum & Energy Mouhamadou Makhtar Cisse said recently that “contract documents” still needed to be finalised.

Upstream understands a key meeting between Sall’s technical adviser and the managing director of state player Petrosen, Mamadou Faye, led to the parastatal’s insistence that title remained unclear for at least two licences and they should be excluded from the round, including ultra-deep acreage likely to attract significant interest from suitors.

Contributing to concerns over contract sanctity is continued uncertainty over the fate of Total-operated Rufisque Deep and Senegal Offshore South Deep (SOSD), both of which are subject to proceedings before the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) brought by African Petroleum Corporation (APCL), which has since merged with Abu Dhabi-funded PetroNor E&P.

Several smaller operators were poised to litigate over letters of revocations and unreasonable delays to approvals sought from Sall’s previous administration but pulled back from the brink, preferring to make the case for negotiation under the current dispensation, a process that takes time.

Senegal has also announced it will host a conference next May to “promote” the deep-water exercise, leading to speculation of a further delay.

Pressed locally on the timetable, Faye said only that the round would proceed “very soon” and that more 3D seismic was being gathered for interested operators, while “further legal documentation was needed to officially launch the round”.

Faye also predicted a final investment decision by the end of December for the Woodside Petroleum-operated SNE project, a $3 billion offshore development stalled by action taken in ICSID by fellow Australian explorer Far Ltd.

Far has claimed that its pre-emptive rights were improperly denied during the 2016 transaction in which Woodside acquired its 35% stake from US independent ConocoPhillips.

As Woodside may yet lose its operatorship if ICSID rules in favour of Far this December, joint venture finance cannot conclude, especially when Senegal’s efforts to raise hundreds of millions of dollars on the capital markets for its own contribution are failing.

Senegal’s public debt could soar to 64% of gross domestic product (GDP), while credit growth remains largely crowded out by larger holdings of government securities and loans, according to credit risk analyst Coface.

Senegal’s current account deficit doubled since 2016 to more than 7% of GDP, a widening matched by substantial increases in external debt, including $3.3 billion in Eurobonds, during the same period, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Sall is now personally supervising publicly financed projects, under pressure from the IMF to reduce external debt, suspending payments across the board until oil and gas starts pumping in 2022 from SNE and the BP-operated Greater Tortue Ameyhim (GTA) scheme straddling the Mauritanian border.

Kosmos has extended the timeline for completing this farmdown of stakes off Mauritania and Senegal into next year following the large gas discovery at the Orca-1 well on Block C8 off Mauritania, which was revealed earlier this week.

It is hoped the arrival on the Senegal scene of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, which BP already partners in the Middle East, will help GTA move forward once the equity line-up is formally readjusted.

(This article has been amended from the original to reflect the fact that there are no outstanding conditions precedent pertaining to sanction of GTA Phase 1. Operator BP said in an statement sent to Upstream that construction of Phase 1 began in the first quarter this year and continues in both Mauritania and Senegal. Also, work on Phase 1 has at no point been suspended, and is progressing to plan, with first gas still expected in 2022, BP added.)

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Senegal’s new acreage round under a shadow