On the face of it, a meeting between the president of Kenya and the CEO of Azerbaijan’s state oil company can be assumed to be one of those courtesy visits which fill diplomatic agendas but yield little in terms of substance. Such a conclusion would clearly not apply to the recent meeting between William Ruto and SOCAR CEO Rovshan Najaf. The reason is simple as it follows on the heels of SOCAR’s first ever direct investment in upstream production in Africa, a 10% interest in Eni’s Baleine field off the coast of Ivory Coast which was agreed upon at the margins of Davos last month, and in a context of keen interest on the part of Kenya in the special expertise of SOCAR in reservoir management and logistics chain optimization.

The Baleine deal, which was announced on January 22 at the World Economic Forum and signed between SOCAR president Rovshan Najaf and Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi, was an extremely well-thought-out entry move. First, Baleine is not just a potential frontier play – it is a producing field, currently providing 62,000 barrels of oil and more than 75 million cubic feet of gas daily through the first two phases of its production, with plans for a third phase that will bring the total production level to 150,000 barrels of oil and 200 million cubic feet of gas daily. The timeline from discovery to first production, achieved only in 2023, is one of the fastest for a deepwater African project since 2021. Besides, the field is marketed as the first net-zero emissions upstream operation in Africa, featuring gas utilization, lower flaring rates, and offsets. The entry into such a field – producing,........

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