May 11th 2018 (Nyamilepedia) – The South Sudan’s government will – in June – pay the government of the neighboring Sudan the last remaining debts it agreed to pay to the northern neighbor in the Cooperation Agreement signed in September 2012 in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, South Sudan’s Petroleum Minister Ezekiel Lol Gatkouth told the Reuters on the sidelines of the African Oil and Power investor Forum in London.
South Sudan is currently producing 130,000 crude barrels per day and aims to hit 280,000 late this year after the government said it is planning to open the Unity oil fields which has been closed down due to the current civil war. The production reduced by 73% after the country was forced to stop producing 350,000 barrels a day by the current civil war.
The Petroleum Minister told Reuters that GPOC, a company made up of local and international oil companies, has hired Hong Kong-listed Frontier Services Group (FSG), which produce a security assessment in March saying it would be safe for GPOC to resume output pointing out that several steps remained before GPOC would resume output and that another venture SPOC, led by Malaysia’s Petronas, had not yet conducted a similar survey.
“The next step (for GPOC) is a technical assessment to see what damage has been done,” he said adding that “the processing facility was destroyed, the control room was destroyed but the pipelines and wellheads are intact. The power lines were destroyed but we got an agreement with Sudan to supply 8 megawatts (MW); the facility needs 18 MW.”
South Sudan descended into civil war in December 2013 after forces loyal to the country’s president, Salva Kiir Mayardiit and his then Governor of Northern Bahr Al-Ghazal State Gen. Paul Malong Awan went door-to-door in the capital Juba killing civilians belonging to the Nuer ethnic group sparking a nation-wide protests from top army generals from the Nuer leading to a civil war.
A peace agreement signed in August 2015 by President Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar and negotiated under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and the African Union (AU) in presence of Troika and other international observers collapsed in July 2016 following fighting at the presidential palace in Juba “J1”.
The IGAD has employed an initiative called High-Level Revitalization Forum to bring back the peace agreement. Previous rounds of the HLRF has been unsuccessful and the IGAD said it expect the warring parties to negotiate on the last round on 17th of May. This week, the IGAD invited all the stakeholders to Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa for consultations for consultations.
