Can Senegal rejuvenate West Africa’s upstream?

Relative stability and promising geology may yield another new frontier in the region

FRESH exploration hotspots have been few and far between across West Africa lately. The exception is Senegal, where highly promising finds and one of West Africa's more stable business regimes are paying dividends for the likes of Kosmos Energy and Cairn Energy. Senegal's offshore acreage is largely di­vided between the more oil-rich south and the more gas-prone north, the latter's geol­ogy being a continuation of that in Mauri­tania, another country coming into its own as a prospective gas producer. To the southwest of Dakar - located on the African mainland's most westerly head­land, Edinburgh-based Cairn has built on an initial oil discovery by Australia's Far Petroleum in 2014, drilling