London South East were joined from Lagos by new Seplat CEO Roger Brown. Seplat is Nigeria's leading indigenous Oil and Gas explorer and producer, with its 50,653 boepd output, liquids production of 33.327 bopd and gas production of 100 MMscfd just announced for the last nine months.
"For us Q2 was the worst in terms of oil price impact" said Roger, "and in Q3 we had some issues with OPEC cuts starting to come in with some of our assets, but we fought our way through it and our 9 month set of results shows the resilience of the company and the robustness of it. We turned around almost $400M, which is $200M of cash, $200M of EBITDA, so the business is cash-positive and its generating revenues and profits for the shareholders going forwards.
"We have got (oil price) hedging in place to counterbalance the issues we have in these troubling times and we are looking further out into 2021, starting to get ready for our drilling programmes next year, both oil and gas, as we start to drive through this. Hopefully it won't go on for ever and by the end of H1 next year we start to see some recovery back into the market.
Seplat have just announced a new 'Energy Unit' based in Lagos. "We've been in gas processing for quite some time and that really is a carbon saving today, and Seplat is bringing that value to the Nigerian Government and population. So how do we go further down the track of gas development? We are looking at LPG, liquid petroleum gas on all of our gas plants and that can be utilised in the local market, we are looking to compress natural gas or CNG and we are looking down the value chain to supplying smaller scale wholesale customers.
And what about renewable energy for Nigeria? "We think it has huge potential, particularly for solar as it obviously has lots of sun all year round here. We really need to get the grid system up to a level, having more gas going through it, and that will then allow on-grid solar power rather than off-grid small scale. That's something we are looking at, and it probably means we have to consider whether we go into the power sector or not. So we created a new Energy Group with the necessary skills to drive that advancement. This will fast-track the energy transition for the company.
"We are looking to the financial close on the ANOH project on the debt side, we have a liquids treatment upgrade and we of course have a drilling campaign. We have a number of exploration wells we are doing peer review on and we really want to bed in one exploration well every year going forward, and there are quite a number of good ones in the Western and Eastern assets. There's a particularly nice one at OML-40 which we bought from Eland. We are also looking at efficiencies and we are looking at our drilling techniques to see if we can bring in more refined drilling techniques.
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Seplat Energy (SEPL)