UPDATE 2-Sonangol expects to reach 2 mln bpd this year
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CAPE TOWN, March 18 (Reuters) - Angola's state-owned oil company Sonangol is expected to reach 2 million barrels per day output later this year, maintaining production to 2014 before tapering off, a senior official said on Tuesday.
"It's possible to reach that production still this year ... this for sure may occur in the last quarter of this year," Syanga Abilio, a board member and vice-president of Sonangol, told Reuters on the sidelines of an oil and gas conference.
Sonangol currently produces 1.9 bpd, making former Portugese colony Angola the African continent's second-largest oil producer after Nigeria.
"We are doing our best to maintain our plateau of 2 million barrels, probably until 2014. Our production profile does indicate normal decline (after 2014) which we will be fulfilling with our exploration programme," Abilio said.
Angola is slowly emerging from a devastating civil war and is benefiting from a booming economy, spurred primarily by revenue from the southern African country's burgeoning oil sector.
Abilio said the company would get a boost from three new deep-water exploration fields off Angola's coast, but did not provide details of when they were expected to come on line or how much they were expected to produce.
"We are discussing and very soon we are going to tell the industry," Abilio said.
The three offshore fields were "Pazflor" and "Clove" in block 17, with France's Total (TOTF.PA) involved in both, and the "PSVM" field in block 31 operated by British Petroleum (BP) (BP.L).
Established in 1976, Sonangol is the exclusive operating company in Angola for the exploration of gas and oil and its activities include prospecting, production and refining. (Reporting by Wendell Roelf; editing by James Jukwey)
