Revenues from contracts with customers are generated from sales in Gabon pursuant to COSPAs. The COSPAs have been and will be renewed or replaced from time to time either with the current buyer or another buyer. The current COSPA with Exxon is scheduled to expire on January 31, 2022. See Note 4 under “Information about the Company’s most significant customers” for further discussion.

COSPAs with customers are renegotiated near the end of the contract term and may be entered into with a different customer or the same customer going forward. Except for internal costs, which are expensed as incurred, there are no upfront costs associated with obtaining a new COSPA.

Customer sales generally occur on a monthly basis when the customer’s tanker arrives at the FPSO and the crude oil is delivered to the tanker through a connection. There is a single performance obligation (delivering crude oil to the delivery point, i.e. the connection to the customer’s crude oil tanker) that gives rise to revenue recognition at the point in time when the performance obligation event takes place. This is referred to as a “lifting”. Liftings can take one to two days to complete. The intervals between liftings are generally 30 days; however, changes in the timing of liftings will impact the number of liftings that occur during the period. Therefore, the performance obligation attributable to volumes to be sold in future liftings are wholly unsatisfied, and there is no transaction price allocated to remaining performance obligations. The Company has utilized the practical expedient in ASC Topic 606-10-50-14(a), which states that the Company is not required to disclose the transaction price allocated to remaining performance obligations if the variable consideration is allocated entirely to a wholly unsatisfied performance obligation. 

The Company accounts for production imbalances as a reduction in reserves. The volumes sold may be more or less than the volumes that the Company is entitled based on the ownership interest in the property, and the Company would recognize a liability if the existing proved reserves were not adequate to cover an imbalance.

For each lifting completed under a COSPA, payment is made by the customer in U.S. dollars by electronic transfer 30 days after the date of the bill of lading. For each lifting of crude oil, pricing is based upon an average of Dated Brent in the month of lifting, adjusted for location and market factors.

Generally, no significant judgments or estimates are required as of a given filing date with regard to applicable price or volumes sold because all of the parameters are known with certainty related to liftings that occurred in the recently completed calendar quarter. As such, the Company deemed this situation to be characterized as a fixed price situation.

In addition to revenues from customer contracts, the Company has other revenues related to contractual provisions under the Etame Marin block PSC. The Etame Marin block PSC is not a customer contract, and therefore the associated revenues are not within the scope of ASC 606. The terms of the Etame Marin block PSC include provisions for payments to the government of Gabon for royalties based on 13% of production at the published price, and a shared portion of “Profit Oil” determined based on daily production rates as well as a gross carried working interest of 7.5% (increasing to 10% beginning June 20, 2026) for all costs. For both royalties and Profit Oil, the Etame Marin block PSC provides that the government of Gabon may settle these obligations in-kind, i.e. taking crude oil barrels, rather than with cash payments.

To date, the government of Gabon has not elected to take its royalties in-kind, and this obligation is settled through a monthly cash payment. Payments for royalties are reflected as a reduction in revenues from customers. Should the government elect to take the production attributable to its royalty in-kind, the Company would no longer have sales to customers associated with production assigned to royalties.

With respect to the government’s share of Profit Oil, the Etame Marin block PSC provides that the corporate income tax liability is satisfied through the payment of Profit Oil. In the condensed consolidated statements of operations, the government’s share of revenues from Profit Oil is reported in revenues with a corresponding amount reflected as current income tax expense. These sales are not considered revenues under a customer contract as the Company is not a party to the contracts with the buyers of this crude oil. However, consistent with the reporting of Profit Oil in prior periods, the amount associated with the Profit Oil under the terms of the Etame Marin block PSC is reflected as revenue with an offsetting amount reported as a current income tax expense. Payments of the income tax expense will be reported in the period that the government takes its Profit Oil in-kind, i.e. the period in which it lifts the crude oil. An in-kind payment of $20.1 million was made with the September 2021 lifting. With the September lifting, the government lifted more oil in-kind than what was owed to it in foreign taxes. Therefore, the Company has a $2.1 million foreign income tax receivable as of September 30, 2021. As of December 31, 2020, the foreign taxes payable attributable to this obligation was $0.9 million.

Certain amounts associated with the carried interest in the Etame Marin block discussed above are reported as revenues. In this carried interest arrangement, the carrying parties, which include the Company and other working interest owners, are obligated to fund all of the working interest costs that would otherwise be the obligation of the carried party. The carrying parties recoup these funds from the carried interest party’s revenues.

The following table presents revenues from contracts with customers as well as revenues associated with the obligations under the Etame Marin block PSC.