Natural gas play Bramlin suggests Cameroon’s Logbaba project could be generating £60,000 daily cash flow in a year’s time.

The product of a reversal of energy hopeful Rodeo Resources into AIM shell Bramlin, the company, run by former Rodeo partner Jim Ford, has 60 per cent of the Logbaba natural gas project, near Douala, the port city and economic capital of Cameroon, one of West Africa’s more stable and trouble-free states. Current estimates put the company’s net attributable reserves there in a range from a proven 300,000 barrels of condensates and other liquids and 7.9 billion cubic feet of gas to a proven, probable and possible total of 4.5 million barrels of liquids and nearly 124 billion cubic feet of gas.

Ford, whose fellow directors include Rodeo partners and former ex-Soviet Union-focused resource entrepreneurs Kevin Foo and Bill Kelleher, claims a net present value of £25 million for the project, based on two wells starting to produce at a daily rate of four million cubic feet of gas from late 2009. That is the same as the estimated capital cost of putting Logbaba into production and before further exploration in the surrounding territory.

Bramlin is presently negotiating with local industries, from breweries and food processors to chemical groups and steel works, over supplying gas to them at $16 (£8) per million btus (British Thermal Units). He says that would be significantly cheaper than their present fuel sources, while still profitable for Bramlin.

Ford says he also hopes to convince American Electrical Services, which is building an 88-megawatt power station near Daoula, that Bramlin can eventually build up production at Logbaba to supply 25 million cubic feet a day to the power station, when it is built, at a still-profitable  $6.25 per million btus. He argues that would be less than a third of currently projected costs.

Bramlin also hopes to probe wells abandoned in the 1950s by former prospector the Elf group, which had hoped for oil, not gas. Ford speculates these could conceivably hold more than a trillion cubic feet of gas.

Bramlin will at some point need more funding for Logbaba. But if results show the long-term possibilities sketched out by directors look realistic, the shares, at 12.5p down from 30p December, should outperform several sector peers.

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