Many A decade ago, at a time when plaices like Ivory Coast and Equatorial Guinea were being largely ignored by the petroleum world majors in favor of proven mega-sources like Nigeria and Angola--and when their drilling sites could thus be leased for a relative song--Joe Bruso helped put these states back on the map. Bruso was part of a small team working for United Meridian Corp. (later acquired by Ocean Energy) that helped discover and develop the big Zafiro field off Equatorial Guinea. The impact for that country of half a million people, Bruso said in a phone interview from Houston, 'has been extraordinary', it was not uninteresting for United Meridian either. Meantime, Ivory Coast, where Bruso and his partner, Coy H. Squyres, discovered the Panthere gas condensate and Lion oil fields, went within a few years from being a net energy importer to a net exporter, and from being an overlooked bit of West African real estate to a place where 'you just can't get acreage' for drilling. Those findings, facilitated by the use of exploration data left behind by the majors, were made on a $1 million annual budget over just four years. The huge returns on a relatively small layout sparked a kind of offshore land rush. While the impact of such finds has been uneven--some of West Africa's poor say they have seen little of the new wealth oil and gas are expected to flow for years in ways that are making this one of the World's more significant producer regions. Hundreds of sites remain to be explored. 'It's amazing the leap to prosperity that the whole place has made,' Bruso said of Equatorial Guinea. He is now president of Sovereign Oil Gas, a small Houston-based firm. American boosters say African oil can help lessen U.S. dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Indeed, a group representing the industry and its backers in Congress and government have called for the Gulf of Guinea to be declared of vital strategic interest. Its waters border Cameroon, Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria. West Africa, led by Nigeria and then Angola and Gabon, now supplies the United States with roughly 15 percent of its oil, but that figure is expected to reach 25 percent over the next decade. West African crude oil tends to be of good quality, selling just below the Brent benchmark. It can reach refineries in the Gulf of Mexico in just 20 days, half the time required from the Middle East, at savings of 35 cents per barrel, according to Petroleum Intelligence Weekly. Representative William Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana, has called for a 'full-fledged makeover of the U.S. strategic relationship with Africa to take advantage of its petroleum potential. 'The United States stands to benefit by having a stable, abundant and relatively inexpensive source of high-quality oil Africa benefits in that it will receive billions of dollars in badly needed investment and government revenue,' he said. 'It is a classic win-win situation.' West African oil production is now about 3.5 million barrels per day, said Michael Rodgers, senior director of upstream services at PFC Energy in Washington. West African reserves are forecast to reach 40 billion barrels by 2010, according to Petroleum Intelligence Weekly. All this, Rodgers said, is not going to lead to a new Middle East-size source of oil for the West. His own estimate of total African reserves of 80 billion barrels is a fraction of the 650 billion to 700 billion barrels in the Middle East. Still, he said, it will diminish 'the importance of the Middle East'. For Bruso, the development of West African oil is far from complete. A spate of 'billion-barrel discoveries' in Nigeria and Angola are yet to be developed, he said, adding that there are seven big sites in development, each likely to produce around 250 million barrels a day. 'That's a huge new volume that will be hitting the market starting between 2004 and 2007,' h