Ivory Coast celebrates oil find as west turns away from fossil fuels

Ivory Coast celebrates oil find as west turns away from fossil fuels

Ivorians celebrated when Italian energy group Eni revealed that it had discovered up to 2bn barrels of oil in waters off the west African country’s coast — the first big find in two decades.

“It’s a great discovery,” said Abdourahmane Cissé, secretary-general of the Ivorian presidency, of last month’s find. “The preliminary results show that, in terms of oil reserves, it is approximately 10 times what we have at the moment,” he said, referring to initial estimates of between 1.5bn and 2bn barrels of oil as well as between 1.8tn and 2.4tn cubic feet of associated gas.

Oil could start flowing within four years, boosting exports from a country that is already the world’s biggest grower of cocoa. “This will be good for the country,” said Cissé.

But not everyone shares his confidence. Ivory Coast has struck oil just as much of the developed world has begun to call time on fossil fuels and some financial institutions are reluctant to take carbon-emitting projects on to their balance sheets.

“People say: ‘We’ve found oil, we’ve found gas, we’re all going to get rich’,” said Kingsmill Bond, an energy strategist at think-tank Carbon Tracker. “But getting involved in extraction of fossil fuels is much riskier than