Ethiopia will begin extracting crude oil on a test basis from reserves in the country’s southeast today.
Fitsum Arega, chief of staff in Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s office, said on Twitter that Abiy had met with officials from Poly-GCL Petroleum Investment Limited to “officially kick-start crude oil production test in Ogaden Region”.
“The company has discovered that there is a prospect of commercial quantities of crude oil in the region,” Fitsum wrote.
The firm is a joint venture of state-owned China POLY Group Corporation and Hong Kong-based Golden Concord Group.
450 barrels will be produced on Thursday 28 June on a trial basis.
The prime minister added that full-scale production of crude oil in the future would help the state alleviate unemployment and the prevailing foreign currency shortage.
Ethiopia also projects to earn up to 8 billion US dollars annually once it begins exporting natural gas at its full capacity.
A pipeline to export gas to Djibouti will be launched in September and will take two years to complete.
