D.R.Congo tries to elbow way into Africa oil club

By Joe Bavier

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Democratic Republic of Congo held its first national oil and gas congress this week, seeking to drum up interest and investment in its potentially lucrative but long ignored crude sector.

Despite its stretch of coast between African oil giant Angola and Republic of Congo, a smaller producer, Democratic Republic of Congo produces just 25,000 barrels of crude a day.

In over three decades it has pumped around 350 million barrels -- the equivalent of barely a month of Saudi production.

Foreign investment has poured into Congo's heavily touted mining sector since polls in 2006 meant to draw a line under decades of mismanagement and armed conflict, but oil has lagged.

Until last year, Congo didn't even have an oil ministry.

"We have three sedimentary basins, but we only know with a certain amount of precision the reserves on the coast. We have only incomplete data for the other two," Oil Minister Lambert Mende told Reuters.

The ministry estimates there are between 2 billion and 4 billion barrels of crude beneath its narrow strip of territorial waters in the Atlantic and onshore near the coast.

However promoters of the sector say the real potential lies elsewhere, from the massive, unexplored Cuvette Centrale Basin in the heart of the world's second largest tropical forest, to Lake Albert on the northeastern border with Uganda.