Coup on Tiny African Islands Felt in Texas Oil Offices - NYT

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Coup on Tiny African Islands Felt in Texas Oil Offices
By SIMON ROMERO

<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/19/business/worldbusiness/19OIL.html>

HOUSTON, July 18 — A coup this week in the West African island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe is reverberating in the corporate suites of the energy industry here, oil company executives said today. Officials from several companies said they were anxiously monitoring events on the potentially oil-rich archipelago, a former Portuguese colony on the Equator in the Gulf of Guinea.

Exxon Mobil of Irving, Tex., the world's largest oil company, and Chrome Energy, a small Houston-based oil and gas company controlled by Nigerian investors, have secured options for oil exploration in the waters off São Tomé, an area just south of oil-rich Nigeria that geologists estimate could hold up to six billion barrels of reserves.

ChevronTexaco, Royal Dutch/Shell and TotalFinaElf are among the other big oil companies that have shown interest in bidding for licenses to explore other areas in auctions scheduled for October. This interest has sent expectations soaring in São Tomé and Príncipe, ae two-island country of 1,000 square miles and 160,000 people where the main export crop is cocoa and the average annual income is $280.

"Oil has created dreams of grandeur for a tiny place that has been on the margins of global affairs for many years," said Gerhard Seibert, an authority on São Tomé at the Institute of Tropical Scientific Investigation in Lisbon. "The army and the political and business elites sense something coming and want a part of it."

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