Fatoumata M’Balou Sanogo is Director General of PETROCI Holding, Côte d’Ivoire’s national oil company, and the first woman to lead it. Appointed by the company’s board on 18 July 2023, she heads the state-owned group as Côte d’Ivoire develops its offshore oil and gas resources, including the Baleine field. In July 2026, PETROCI Holding formally took over as operator of the Espoir field (block CI-26) from CNR.

A petroleum engineer, Sanogo graduated in 2003 from the Institut National Polytechnique Félix Houphouët-Boigny (INP-HB) in Yamoussoukro and later earned an Executive MBA from Hult International Business School. Over more than 20 years in drilling, completion and production operations, she worked for Schlumberger from 2003 to 2010, as a completion engineering consultant with Halliburton in Iraq, as a senior production engineer with OMV Petrom in Romania, and in senior well engineering roles with TotalEnergies in Angola, Algeria, the United Kingdom and France. She also founded MAROIL, a petroleum consultancy that has advised countries such as Mauritania and Senegal.

PETROCI Holding’s net result rose from about FCFA 2.5 billion in 2022 to FCFA 20.6 billion in 2023, the year she took office, and reached FCFA 35 billion in 2025. Sanogo received the Elephant award for individual contribution to Africa’s energy industry at the Africa Energies Summit in London in May 2024, was honoured at the Global Power Women Awards in London in 2025, and received an Excellence Trophy at a national awards ceremony in Abidjan in April 2026.

Her priorities include accelerating exploration and production, improving governance and operational performance at the national company, and building partnerships with international operators and other national oil companies. In 2026, she met the President of SOCAR to review progress on the Baleine project and discuss cooperation in upstream development, trading and refining.