Mauritania started pumping its first oil on Friday from its offshore Chinguetti field, operated by Australia's Woodside Petroleum, a senior executive from the state oil company said. "It's started. All of the vents are open," Ismail Abdel Vetah, director of operations for Mauritania's national oil company SMH, told Reuters. Woodside's partners in the $530 million Chinguetti project, forecast to pump 75,000 barrels of oil per day, are Hardman Resources, BG Group, Premier Oil Plc, Roc Oil Co. Ltd. and the Mauritanian government. The Islamic Republic, which lies on the western edge of the Sahara desert, is hoping that oil revenues will help lift its three million people out of poverty. Some two-thirds of the population live on less than $2 a day. "Our people have a lot of hope placed in oil and we sincerely intend to improve the standard of living in our country," Mauritania's oil minister Mohamed Aly Ould Sidi Mohamed said in an interview on Thursday. He said the state expected to make $200 million a year from oil output at Chinguetti -- thought to contain up to 120 million barrels of crude -- and more once other offshore discoveries started producing. State oil officials hope the barren nation, which straddles black and Arab West Africa, will be producing 300,000 barrels a day in three or four years time, once three other fields in the same basin as Chinguetti come on line. --SP 20 39 Local Time 17 39 GMT
