Italian oil giant, Eni has hit back at the government, saying, it is acting in full compliance with the law together with its partner Vitol and therefore remains open to exploring any potential unitisation that would optimise hydrocarbon recovery from the Sankofa field.

Eni’s statement is coming on the back of a directive by the Energy Ministry to combine its adjacent oil and gas fields with Springfield, after both parties failed to reach an agreement.

According to the oil firm, the reports supporting the position of the Energy Ministry neither demonstrates the existence of communication between Sankofa and Afina oil fields nor ascertains definitively that the discovery are producible.

Eni said together with Vitol are looking forward to a collaborative engagement on the unitisation issue in order to reach a consensual outcome reflecting applicable law, relevant project agreements and industry standards.

Furthermore, “unitisations are a common practice in the oil and gas sector as they allow to maximize production and share production and costs among the parties in the unit on a fair and equitable basis”.

As such, “Eni has been involved in various part of the world in the unitisation of several straddling fields, and therefore Eni and Vitol are in no way against evaluating the possibility for unitisation, should sufficient and reliable subsurface data show that the Sankofa field and Springfield’s Afina discovery are straddling”.

The statement noted that to date, they [Eni & Vitol] have not received discovery data to ascertain whether the Afina discovery, drilled one year ago and never tested, and the Sankofa Cenomanian Oil field, which was discovered in 2012 and has been in production for about three and half years, are straddling the license border, among others.

Additionally, there has not been any appraisal of the Afina discovery that would establish commerciality of the discovery and allow the parties to progress on the unitisation process.