Hunting the African elephant

After success in Texas, the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea, Vanco Energy, the Houston-based independent, has turned its attention to Africa, where its owner expects to multiply past success many times over, reports Derek Bamber

        Gene Van Dyke, chairman, Vanco Energy FROM SITTING on a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico as a trainee mud-engineer to sitting on, potentially, 20bn barrels of recoverable oil off the coast of Africa took Gene Van Dyke more than 50 years. Now Vanco Energy, the company he founded and of which he is chairman, is the biggest net acreage holder in deep water off the west coast of Africa well ahead of the industry and regional giants, such as Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, TotalFinaElf and ChevronTexaco (see Figure 1). And if you include acreage offshore Madagascar and recently acquired acreage offshore Ghana, Vanco's acreage covers the equivalent of 80% of th