DEA Finance SA announced that LetterOne, the shareholder of the DEA Group, has confirmed it has signed a Letter of Intent with BASF to combine the parties’ oil and gas businesses in a joint venture to be named Wintershall DEA.
BASF owns Wintershall who has a concession agreement in Libya. Wintershall is currently in a contractual dispute with Libya’s NOC.
The NOC insists that in 2010 it and Wintershall had signed a Memorandum of Understanding under which in return for extending the company’s 1956 concession, due to run out last year, it gave up uniquely advantageous terms and accept the type of Exploration and Production Sharing Agreement (ESPA) under which all other foreign oil companies in Libya operate.
A partial agreement between the two sides was reached in June after mediation by the German ambassador Christian Buck.
In its statement, DEA says that there is no guarantee that the companies will enter into definitive transaction agreements or that the intended transaction will be consummated. The company shall be headquartered jointly in Hamburg and Kassel, the press release reported.
DEA has been active in Libya since 2003 and has been granted a total of seven concessions by Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC) since then.
The company is presently active in three concessions, providing it with a concession area of 14,235 square kilometres. Two of the licences are in the Sirte Basin (NC 193 and NC 195), while one concession on the Cyrenaica platform (Area 58) is located in the northeast of the country. DEA is operator in the aforementioned concession regions with a 100% share in each case.
Following successful exploration in the years up to 2010, DEA reports that it is currently preparing field development in individual concessions.
DEA employs some 50 persons in Tripoli and Benghazi. Following the successful activities in Egypt and the recent project progress in the Algerian Sahara, DEA reports that it is expanding its position in North Africa further with its involvement in Libya.
DEA reports that its exploration in the Libyan Sirte Basin have been highly successful, with a total of eight discoveries. The company says it is preparing the development of the six successfully discovered wells in concession NC 193 and the two discoveries in concession NC 195.
It reports that it has further planned exploration in the Sirte Basin and anticipates the acquisition of a total of 800 square kilometres of 3D seismic data and drilling of two exploration wells in each of the two concessions.
In the Cyrenaica Plateau DEA reports that it has acquired 2D seismic data for a total of 4,600 kilometres for the concession granted in January 2008 Two exploration wells are planned in order to further explore the gas potential in the region.
DEA Deutsche Erdoel AG is an international exploration and production company for oil and gas with headquarters in Hamburg, Germany. It has 128 production licences in 8 countries with Euro 1.5 bn sales and 50 million barrels of oil equivalent production.
The DEA Group comprises L1E Finance GmbH & Co. KG and its subsidiaries, including DEA Finance SA and DEA Deutsche Erdoel AG and its subsidiaries.
LetterOne is a privately-owned, Luxembourg-based international investment business. LetterOne owns the DEA Group through L1 Energy, LetterOne’s oil & gas investment business.
