Luba Freeport
West Africa have draught problems in one form or another. Big vessels can only get into the nearest alternative Douala once a day because they have to wait for the tide to get them over the sandbar. Takoradi in Ghana has a quayside that will give you 12 or 13 metres at high tide but that drops to about seven at low tide.” In Malabo, where draught is restricted to 10 metres, vessels queue for up to 10 days to get into the port, he says, and four or five days’ delay can be expected anywhere on the coast from Ghana to Cameroon. The other disadvantage they all share with Malabo is that these ports are landlocked, having developed as the port area of a city. They have no hinterland and very restricted space around the quayside for exploration drilling companies to establish storage and supply facilities. “We established Luba Freeport as a logistics base dedicated to the oil industry. We are in a well sheltered bay, with deep water access. Luba has a natural draught of 10 metres at the current quayside, and in the next stage of our development that will increase to at least 16 metres.” The tide differential is the lowest in West Africa, he adds, at just one metre. At the time of Luba Freeport’s inception, ExxonMobil was just about the main oil producer. Now that it has been joined by Marathon and Amerada Hess, at around 400,000 barrels a day, Equatorial Guinea has become the third largest producing nation in West Africa after Nigeria and Angola, just 15 years after its first crude was pumped. All of these companies have established facilities at Luba, says McDowall. And now they have been joined by Noble Energy, which is sitting on a major oil and gas discovery in the region. He paints a picture of the activity Noble Energy’s involvement will trigger before it starts to pump oil in 2012: “They have completed all their major exploration wells and the development phase, and are ready for entering the production phase later this year or early in 2012. Single Buoy Moorings (SBM), with its operating offices
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