ANGOLA'S NATIONAL oil company Sonangol has an impressive list of subsidiaries, but company officials are counting on its exploration and production division, Sonangol Pesquisa & Produção, to lead the group towards its goal of becoming an established operating company that depends less and less on simply reaping the benefits of a concessionaire. Pesquisa & Produção has taken an active role in the company's development plans, and weighs heavily in the group's joint-venture plans to build a US$2 billion refinery in the coastal city of Lobito and a US$3 billion liquefied natural gas project with Texaco.

The subsidiary's exploration and production activities through Sonangol include partnerships with foreign companies to operate in the country's most promising oil blocks, including Angola's rich deep-water fields off the northern coast, where some 30 oil discoveries have been announced over the past four years. Sonangol owns two dozen oil and gas concessions, or blocks, in which its exploration and production arm, Pesquisa & Produção, is involved. The largest by far is located in Block Zero offshore of Cabinda, an Angolan enclave to the north bordering the Democratic Republic of the Congo, that accounts for some 70% of all Angolan crude oil production. At the end of 1999, output there reached more than 500,000 barrels per day.

In 2000, Sonangol's partners in the Block Zero fields expected to increase production there by 100,000 barrels per day and US$4 billion has been ear-marked for field development activities over the next four years. Since most of Angola's production is exported to the United States, Sonangol's partners include several powerhouses in the U.S. oil indus-try. Its own U.S. subsidiary, Sonangol USA, is based in Houston. In February 2000, the giant multinational oil company Chevron, which has been operating in Angola for more than 40 years, announced that it had completed studies at two deep-water wells in one of the blocks it operates along with Sonangol, Italy's Agip, the Franco-Belgian TotalFinaElf and Portugal's Petrogal.

The studies indicated that the two recent discoveries in block 14 would result in an average total output of 20,000 barrels per day. Other significant discoveries have been made at deep-water offshore Block 17, which is located north-west of Luanda in 4,500 feet of water. The so-called Girassol field in that block is esti-mated to contain up to one billion barrels of recoverable reserves, and peak production of 200,000 barrels per day is planned by the end of this year. And in April 2000, Sonangol and Elf Exploration Angola, a subsidiary of Total-FinaElf, announced their ninth consecutive oil discovery in deep-water Block 17, at the Jasmin-1 well that produced some 11,000 barrels a day during production tests.

Last August, TotalFinaElf announced that it had begun drilling the first of 40 wells at the Girassol development, a US$2.5 billion project. Last year, BP Amoco officials announced that the company had made its third oil discovery in Angola Block 18 with estimated reserves of some 500 million barrels. And in June 2000, Exxon Mobil announced another deep-water discovery at Block 15, where total recoverable reserves are estimated to top two billion barrels.

In a statement from Chevron officials released out of San Francisco last January after the company announced that it had begun production from Angola's first-ever deep-water oil field, Kuito. Vice chairman Dick Matzke noted that, "with the advent of Kuito production, Angola approaches the future with the distinction of being one of the world's best areas for frontier oil exploration and production, especially in deep-water areas." "In the years to come, development of the other significant discoveries we have made in Block 14 will become a major element contributing to Angola's economic growth," he added. Block 14 is operated by Chevron, which holds a 31% interest in the concession along with Sonangol and five other international oil companies.