Following the footsteps of neighbor West African countries, Benin adopted in January 2019 a new Petroleum Act.

The new Act was highly expected further to the first discovery of 87 million barrels of oil made in 2013 by SAPETRO, a Nigerian gas exploration and production company.

The new Act includes lots of innovations, aiming inter alia at setting up an attractive investment framework for investors by alleviating the processes to access exploration blocks. But it strikes also a right balance between investors' interests and States' ones by promoting governance and transparency in the sector.

The new Act includes also local content policies, compelling operators applying for production authorization to submit a local content plan.

In this paper, we address these innovations, and many others included in the Act.

Click hear to access the paper on Afrimag.