French oil major TotalEnergies' CEO will discuss signing an offshore exploration contract with Syrian officials on Tuesday, he said, but added that lingering insecurity meant a return to onshore oil activities was still not a viable option.
Underscoring Patrick Pouyanne's reluctance, French President Emmanuel Macron's visit to the country, which the Total CEO was accompanying as part of a business delegation, was overshadowed by bomb attacks in the capital Damascus on Tuesday.
Prior to pulling out of Syria in 2011 due to EU sanctions, Total produced about 30,000 barrels of oil per day in the country's east, as well as some gas.
"Clearly the security situation still does not allow us to work here today," Pouyanne told journalists in Damascus.
"Today the sector is in poor condition, various groups continued producing during the conflict, but in a completely irregular way...frankly Syria is not a major oil story," he said.
Total signed a memorandum of understanding with the Syrian Petroleum Company in May to explore an offshore block in the Mediterranean.
"Syria's offshore area has never really been explored historically, so we have partnered with other companies to look into it. We will discuss it today with our Syrian counterparts to see whether we can move toward a contract," Pouyanne said.
"Obviously, we'd rather find oil than gas, but in the eastern Mediterranean most discoveries so far — in Cyprus and Israel, for example — have been gas," he added.
Total has also recently spoken about the need to build pipelines through Syria to transport oil from Iraq as an alternative to the Strait of Hormuz in the wake of the US-Israeli war with Iran.
And Pouyanne reiterated on Tuesday that projects to rebuild oil transit routes between Iraq and Syria, such as the Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline, were the priority.
No project site visits were planned for Total during the daylong trip, the CEO said, because the terrain was not safe enough to send teams in.
"We need to give the government time to establish control over the country, we also have to be realistic with a country emerging from 15 years of civil war. We need patience, this will be part of our discussions," he said.
Pouyanne was speaking shortly before the bomb attacks. A Total press representative declined to comment on whether his schedule had been affected by the incident.
(Reporting by America Hernandez in Paris, Reuters reporting in Damascus, additional reporting by Ahmad Rasheed in Baghdad; Editing by Inti Landauro, Tomasz Janowski and Joe Bavier)
