"Woodside extracted the first oil from the Sangomar field, completing the delivery of the country's first offshore oil project," declared the company, which explores the field with the Petroleum Society of Senegal (Petrosen), in a statement cited by the French oil and gas agency news, France-Presse (AFP).
The deep water field, located around 100 km south of Dakar, contains oil and gas, explained in the statement, which recalls that the project was launched in 2020 and had an investment of around 5 billion dollars to try to guarantee the objective of producing 100 thousand barrels per day.
Oil and gas production in Senegal is intended for export and domestic consumption, but is far from reaching the production values recorded in Angola or Nigeria, the largest producer in the region, with more than 1 million barrels per day.
Even so, the Senegalese Government estimates that it will receive billions of dollars in revenue, which could guarantee an acceleration in the transformation of the economy.
"The start of extraction from the Sangomar field marks the beginning of a new era, not only for our country's industry and economy, but above all for our people", commented the general director of Petrosen, Thierno Ly, quoted in the Woodside press release.
The discovery of vast oil and gas deposits in the Atlantic since 2014 has raised great hopes in this poor, developing country, which expects to receive an annual average of more than one billion euros over a period of thirty years in oil revenues.
