Senegal Analyst: Oil Gas Revenue Traceability Shows Discrepancies

• Senegal faces significant challenges in tracing the state's share of oil and gas production revenues, despite overall transparency progress.
• An analyst identified data discrepancies between operators, PETROSEN, and public administrations, particularly for Sangomar and GTA projects.
• The ITIE 2024 report revealed an unreconciled gap of 2.48 billion CFA francs in sector revenues.
• Specific data inconsistencies include differing production and commercialization figures for Sangomar between DGH and PETROSEN, and varying state Profit Oil estimates from PETROSEN and Woodside.
• Hydrocarbon revenues for Senegal significantly increased in the first half of 2025, reaching 75.95 billion CFA francs, though mining remains the dominant extractive sector.

This evolving revenue picture underscores Senegal's increasing reliance on hydrocarbon income for public funds, making it even more urgent to establish robust mechanisms for tracking produced volumes, commercialized volumes, and the state's effectively received share.

Despite Senegal's commendable strides in fostering transparency within its extractive sector, a significant challenge persists: accurately tracing the state's share of hydrocarbon production revenues. Elimane Haby Kane, a public policy and governance analyst at LEGS Africa, has identified notable discrepancies in data reported by operators, PETROSEN, and various public administrations. This issue gains heightened urgency as the Sangomar oil field commenced production in 2024 and the Grand Tortue Ahmeyim (GTA) gas project commenced its first sales in late 2024.

Kane argues that the existing legal, financial, and institutional frameworks governing the sharing and management of these hydrocarbon revenues must be critically re-examined to align with Senegal's emerging oil and gas landscape. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (ITIE) plays a pivotal role in this oversight, with its reports designed to compare revenues declared by companies against those actually received by the state, thereby documenting the financial flows from natural resource exploitation. The analyst notes that the primary difficulties have shifted from tracking conventional fiscal flows to ensuring the precise traceability of revenues directly derived from hydrocarbon production itself.

Kane's analysis, which incorporates findings from the ITIE 2024 report, underscores specific inconsistencies in reported data. This report, covering 91.89% of the sector's revenues, highlighted an unreconciled gap of 2.48 billion CFA francs, representing 0.60% of the total reconciled receipts. However, the most pronounced difficulties are associated with data pertaining to the Sangomar project.

For instance, the Direction générale des hydrocarbures (DGH) reported a production of 16,905,459 barrels for 2024, while PETROSEN declared 14,226,573 barrels as commercialized during the same period. Further divergences emerged in the calculation of the state's Profit Oil, with PETROSEN estimating approximately 672,000 barrels compared to Woodside's figure of nearly 820,000 barrels. Crucially, Kane pointed out that the state's share of production for 2024 was not fully accounted for in the declarations for that fiscal year, particularly concerning revenues received in kind.

While 2024 presented significant traceability challenges, the visibility of revenues improved considerably from 2025 as hydrocarbon commercialization intensified. The first semi-annual ITIE 2025 report indicates a substantial increase in hydrocarbon revenues, reaching 75.95 billion CFA francs. This figure represents an approximate 66% rise compared to the first half of 2024. Out of a total of 303.02 billion CFA francs in extractive revenues, 293.24 billion CFA francs, or 96.77%, were allocated to the state budget.

Despite this growth in hydrocarbon contributions, the mining sector maintained its dominance, accounting for approximately 74% of extractive revenues during the period under review. The report also provided more detailed information on the commercialization of the state's production share, which was valued at roughly 37.5 billion CFA francs. Sangomar largely drove this dynamic, while the Grand Tortue Ahmeyim (GTA) project recorded its initial sales, with 666,880 cubic meters of gas commercialized for Senegal and Mauritania.

This evolving revenue picture underscores Senegal's increasing reliance on hydrocarbon income for public funds, making it even more urgent to establish robust mechanisms for tracking produced volumes, commercialized volumes, and the state's effectively received share. Kane emphasizes that this shift confirms Senegal's gradual transition towards an economy where hydrocarbon revenues will play an increasingly significant role in public receipts.

Senegal received a 'satisfactory' score in its 2023 ITIE Validation, the highest possible score. The need to scrutinize Senegal hydrocarbon production sharing agreements and ensure comprehensive PETROSEN Woodside revenue data reporting is paramount to mitigate future regulatory risks and ensure the nation fully benefits from its natural resources.

Lawyers advising energy companies in Senegal must scrutinize hydrocarbon revenue reporting and production sharing agreements, especially for Sangomar and GTA, given identified discrepancies between operator, PETROSEN, and state data, to ensure compliance and mitigate regulatory risks.

Source: Original reporting via SenePlus