Sonangol negotiations director Jorge Vandeste said the firm was also planning a 150-200,000 bpd oil refinery at Benguela, a gas and condensate project at Cabinda, a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) plant South of the Zaire river, a gas pipeline to Luanda and a gas-fired power plant in the capital."These are not dreams," Vandeste told delegates at the sixth annual Africa Upstream conference in Cape Town.

Vandeste told delegates of Sonangol's plans under which it expected oil output of at least 1.4 million barrels per day (bpd) by 2003 as foreign oil firms ploughed finance and cutting edge technolgy into Africa's hottest exploration play.

Vandeste said production based on already approved field developments would rise from a present 8,00,000 bpd to 8,10,000 bpd in 2000, 9,00,000 bpd in 2001 before rising to 1.05 million bpd a year later.From thatlevel it would accelerate to 1.4 million bpd, boosted by output from giant frontier deep-water fields.Capital expenditure was scheduled to reached $4.13 billion next year, $4.86 billion in 2001, $4.85 billion in 2002 and $4.82 billion in 2003, compared to an annual average of $1.2 billion in the early nineties.

Industry giants hoping for discoveries

Oil industry executives from major companies such as Chevron, Exxon, Elf, Shell and BP Amoco are hoping for billion barrel discoveries as their firms sink wells off Angola.The bulk of this investment will go in deep-water and ultra-deep offshore acreage where water depths reach more than 2,500 metres with a reservoir rock similar to Brazil's Campos Basin which yields giant fields.

Texaco will begin exploratory oil drilling at its closely-watched offshore block nine acreage in Angola's Kwanza Basin next year, Texaco's regional manager Tom Duncan said on the sidelines of the conference.Texaco is operator of blocks nine and 22 in the Kwanza Basin, an untestedAngolan oil province which hold the potential to match even Angola's main producing region off Cabinda, according to analysts.Investment is also planned in the downstream sector with Texaco planning the development of a three million tonne a year LNG project that would use 500 million cubic feet per day of gas to start production as early as 2004.This would cost at least $2 billion, according to analysts.

"We will see a sharp increase in investment and development activities," Sonangol vice-president Syanga Abilio said .The increase in upstream capacity was reflected in plans to accelerate drilling programmes.

The number of drilled wells would increase to 40 next year, 44 in both 2001 and 2002 and 47 in 2003, up from a recent annual average of around 30 wells, Vandeste said.

Foreign oil firms are waiting for Sonangol to tender its six remaining vacant offshore exploration blocks and draw out new ultra-deep segments. Vandeste gave no indication of timing on these fresh blocks.

Angola, West Africa'ssecond largest oil producer behind Nigeria, is gripped by a 25-year-old civil war that has killed nearly a million people.

Diplomats say the government draws on oil investment pouring into the country to fund purchases of weapons to use in its fight against the rebel National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).