Energy — oil & gas in Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Energy — oil & gas

DRC oil production is small and concentrated. The Coastal Basin off Muanda, in the narrow Atlantic frontage of Kongo Central province, produces roughly 25,000 barrels per day from offshore platforms operated by Perenco. The crude is exported entirely; there is no domestic refining capacity at scale. The basin is geologically a southern extension of the same Lower Congo system that has produced Angola's coastal fields for decades, and the technical profile is mature brownfield — declining pressure, water-cut management, well-integrity work on platforms that have run for many years. Perenco has been the consolidator here, taking on positions divested by majors and running them at lower cost; the operating environment is workable, and Muanda itself is far enough from the eastern security situation to be effectively a different country.

The interior story is different and unresolved. The Albertine Graben on the eastern border holds the Lake Albert oil play that has been the centre of the Tilenga and Kingfisher developments on the Ugandan side; the DRC side has been studied but not commercially developed, and the cross-border arrangements with Uganda have moved slowly. Lake Tanganyika's southern basin holds confirmed hydrocarbon shows. The Cuvette Centrale — the central Congo Basin rainforest — has been the subject of repeated licensing rounds and repeated international concern over peat-bog carbon stores and biodiversity. In October 2024 the hydrocarbons ministry cancelled the 2022 round of 27 oil blocks, citing a thin and irregular bid book. In 2025 a new round was launched covering 55 blocks, of which 52 had not previously been offered, including acreage overlapping the Salonga, Upemba and Virunga protected areas. That round is a live political issue in 2026 and the legal and reputational risk profile for any operator considering interior acreage is substantial.

Lake Kivu is the unusual play. The lake holds an estimated 60 billion cubic metres of dissolved methane in stratified deep waters, with annual regeneration of 120-250 million cubic metres. In 2024 the DRC awarded three Lake Kivu gas blocks — Makelele to Symbion Power, Idjwi to Winds Energy & Production, and Lwandjofu to Alfajiri Energy. The technical model is gas extraction and conversion to power, building on the precedent set by KivuWatt on the Rwandan side. This is a small, specialised play with non-trivial safety and environmental constraints, but it is real and it sits in a part of the country where electricity demand is acute.

For Saga, the energy read of the DRC over the next 12 to 24 months is selective. Muanda is a credible brownfield environment for Norwegian completion, integrity-management and decommissioning capability — the technical content is similar enough to coastal Angola and Cabinda to translate. Lake Kivu is a watching brief; the operator group is small and the regulatory frame is still maturing. The interior basin is not a market we are positioning into.