Washington -- In the not too distant future, West Africa will be producing more barrels of oil per day than the world's largest oil producer, Saudi Arabia, predicted Gene Van Dyke, president and chief executive officer of VANCO Energy Corporation.

Speaking to a November 7 business roundtable on the historic African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), Van Dyke said Saudi Arabia currently produces eight million barrels of oil per day while West Africa produces about 3.7 million barrels a day, primarily from Nigeria and Angola.

But West African production is expected to increase to 10 million barrels per day within five years, he quickly added, and thus could soon be eclipsing Saudi Arabia's production.

Van Dyke told the business and government representatives in attendance that the world consumes and produces about 50 million barrels of oil per day. The United States consumes 20 million barrels per day but only produces six million barrels per day, leaving a 14 million barrel shortfall that must be imported.

The United States, Van Dyke noted, gets 15 percent of its imports from West Africa and is headed for 25 percent. "West Africa is now, and will be in the future, fantastically important to the oil economy in the United States," he confidently predicted.

Vanco Energy Company is the largest deep-water license holder operating off the coast of West Africa, specializing in water between 1,000 feet (305 meters) to 10,000 feet (3050 meters) deep. Vanco is now in various stages of start-up across millions of hectares of deep-water coastal property adjoining Morocco, Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Namibia and Madagascar.

Van Dyke said his company has twice the deep-water drilling property of its nearest competitor under contract for exploration in deep-water West Africa. "Being in the business and being a geologist, I understand the potential of West Africa -- and the potential of West Africa is really phenomenal."

"What is happening is that the onshore areas of the world -- the continental shelves of the world -- are all pretty matured and have been explored. But deep-water is just starting. It has been explored pretty well in the Gulf of Mexico and Eastern Brazil, but in West Africa it is just at the beginning stages," he said.

Deep-water production has been ongoing for quite a while in Nigeria and Angola, he explained, but other countries are now starting to come up as well. Equatorial Guinea, which currently produces 250,000 barrels a day, will soon be rising to 400,000 barrels a day. With its population of 400,000 citizens, Van Dyke suggested Equatorial Guinea could be "the Kuwait of West Africa."

Both Cote d'Ivoire and Morocco have great potential as offshore producers and Van Dyke predicted some "major discoveries" there.

In a follow-up interview with the Washington File, Van Dyke said West Africa has published reserves of 46 billion (46,000 million) barrels. "I think that could come up to 100 billion (100,000 million) barrels in the next four or five years, and that is equivalent to what is held each by Iraq, Iran or Kuwait.

"The good thing about West Africa is that you can get to the United States without going through a canal, it is not in an unstable area (referring to offshore drilling), and is half as far away from the United States as the Middle East."

Van Dyke said, "The window of opportunity in the oil exploration business is about two years. I just hit Africa at the right time." That cycle happens worldwide in the same manner, where within two years everything is discovered and then bought-up or staked out, he said. "All oil basin plays are that way," he noted, "whether it's the north slope of Alaska, or the North Sea, or Russia."

West Africa, he said, is in the latter half of the two-year exploration phase.

Van Dyke, whose company has also been very active in the southern part of the North Sea, confidently called deep-water drilling "the future of the upstream oil business."

Production advances, using FPSO or Flotation, Production, Storage and Offloading technology, now make deep-water drilling very practical, he said. "I have been a fan of FPSO (type tankers) where you have separation facilities on top of the tanker that perform the first rough processing of oil at the drill site," he said.

"You drill your wells; the oil is brought up from the seafloor onto the tanker where the oil, gas and water are separated on the deck. The water is cleaned and dumped back into the ocean; your gas is generally re-injected (into the earth) or flared (burned off); and your oil is then stored in your tanker. Every week or so, a shuttle tanker comes in, pumps out the oil and takes it to Rotterdam or New York or wherever" it is needed.

"West Africa is an excellent area where you can drill wells and complete them fast, bringing them into production using these FPSOs," he explained. West Africa is also very good, he said, because the weather is very benign, the wells below the seabed are not very deep, so it is very simple and easy to drill these wells."

As an example, he said Triton Oil Company discovered the Ceiba field in Equatorial Guinea, went in and drilled five wells on the sea floor and leased an FPSO. Within 14 months of its initial drilling date, he said, they were producing 50,000 barrels a day.

In West Africa, he said, "you can bring these wells on stream very, very fast, producing in the range of 10,000 barrels a day. You can get your money back very, very fast. It is very, very profitable. And all of these West African countries are pushing to get independents and major oil companies to come in there and find oil."

Although it is profitable, he cautioned that deep-water drilling off the African coast is still in its early stages. "Between Nigeria and Gibraltar, there are only six or seven deep-water wells drilled. So it is at a very early stage of drilling even though it's at a very late stage of lot acquisition and seismic" exploration.

Also, now, he said, "exploration and drilling are two very, very sophisticated processes. You have three-dimensional seismic data and because of that, in many cases, you can actually 'see' your oil" as you drill towards it.

Exploration wells drilled in West Africa have a success rate of about 50% versus 10 percent elsewhere around the world, he said. What that means, he explained, is that "50 to 60 percent of the exploration wells drilled in West Africa succeed in finding a field that is in excess of 100 million barrels."

Additionally, he said, "the drilling is fantastically successful because you can drill in a directional manner. A lot of the oil in West Africa is stratographic oil," he explained, "lying in old river channels that come off the African mainland. When you drill a well you can see the river channel on your seismic indicators and drill down the river channel. So you get all the oil that is in there."

(The Washington File is a product of the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State.)