The return of oil majors to African exploration projects as upstream spending recovers threatens to slow down, rather than accelerate, the pace of new finds in the region, Equatorial Guinea’s energy minister has warned. Receive daily email alerts, subscriber notes & personalize your experience. Register Now With oil prices recovering to $70/b this year, interest in Africa’s oil and gas potential has been reignited, with profit-making oil majors picking up exploration acreage abandoned by less cash-rich independents. But oil majors can often take longer to assess, prioritize, execute and appraise frontier exploration drilling compared to more nimble, tightly focused independent explorers, Gabriel Mbaga Obiang Lima told S&P Global Platts. “Majors are like big elephants, they are very slow. That means that the development of fast-tracking initiatives will slow down,” he said on the sidelines of an oil conference in Cape Town. Acknowledging that deep-pocketed global oil […]