Comprehensive Information on Complex Crises
Angelia Sanders
Desk Officer, Northeast Africa
angelia.sanders@cimicweb.org
This document discusses the oil and gas industries within East Africa1, regional plans to develop infrastructure to refine and export the oil and gas, and challenges faced in each country and within the region. Related information is available at www.cimicweb.org. Hyperlinks to source material are highlighted in blue and underlined in the text. All maps are hyperlinked to their source locations.
RE: Emerging Energy Resources In East Africa
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This document discusses the oil and gas industries within East Africa1, regional plans to develop infrastructure to refine and export the oil and gas, and challenges faced in each country and within the region. Related information is available at www.cimicweb.org. Hyperlinks to source material are highlighted in blue and underlined in the text. All maps are hyperlinked to their source locations.
September 2012
1 For the purposes of this report, the countries of East Africa include: Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Somalia, South Sudan, Uganda and Tanzania.
2 The Jubilee field’s recoverable fields are estimated to be more than 370 million barrels, with an upside potential of 1.8 billion barrels.
Introduction
East Africa has become one of the world’s most active exploration areas since Anadarko Petroleum Corporation (APC) made the decade’s biggest gas discovery off Mozambique in 2010. Though exploration in East Africa is at its earliest stages, explorers to date have discovered more than 100 trillion cubic feet of gas, an amount that could meet US gas demands for four years, reports Bloomberg. The interest in the potential yields of gas and oil has caused a surge of companies into the region eager to explore. Cormark Securities, an independent investment dealer, reported in early 2011 that exploration in East Africa presented "considerable risks" but that it also offered "huge potential rewards as many companies have been able to obtain large acreage positions with exposure to world-class oil prospects". For the countries involved there is now the possibility of oil and gas revenues that can be used for national socio-economic programmes. Within countries recovering from decades of civil war, such as South Sudan and Somalia, oil revenues can provide funding for reconstruction efforts and infrastructure develop-ment. Amidst the excitement and uncertainty, one thing remains clear, dialogue must continue on how to develop the infrastructure and governmental guidelines needed to manage the new discoveries.
Theories on Gas and Oil Discovery
According to the continental drift theory, the world was once a consolidated land mass called Pangea before splitting apart into the land masses we know today. Tullow Oil, a UK-based company, used this theory to develop an inno-vative practice of first discovering oil and then looking for geographical trends across the Atlantic and Indian oceans. This approach was first applied in West Africa following the discovery of the Jubilee fields in Ghana.2 The company applied the theory that a mirror image of the oil deposits off West Africa could be found in waters off of Latin America. This assumption was proved correct when the company discovered oil fields in the waters off French Guiana which could contain more than a billion barrels or more of recoverable oil. Tullow then applied their success in West Africa to East Africa. The East African Rift System is the largest continental rift system on the Earth’s surface and extends from Jordan to Mozambique. The system consists of two branches: the Eastern Rift Valley (often called the Great Rift Valley, or Rift Valley) and the Western
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Tanzania as an Emerging Energy Producer
The following document provides a summary of a meeting held at Chatham
House on 26 February 2013. The meeting looked at Tanzania’s emerging
energy sector.
Tanzania is drawing growing attention as a pivotal country in East Africa for
oil and natural gas exploration, having led the region in terms of new
discoveries of natural gas in 2012. With known gas reserves of approximately
7.5 billion cubic feet, the potential to transform Tanzania's international
standing and domestic electricity production is considerable. However, recent
protests against the construction of a pipeline to Dar es Salaam highlight the
challenges that Tanzania faces in ensuring that the benefits of its natural
resources are widely felt.
At this event Honourable Sospeter Muhongo, Minister for Energy and
Minerals for the United Republic of Tanzania discussed his plans for the
development and management of Tanzania’s energy sector. The meeting
consisted of a 30-minute presentation which was given on the record,
followed by a question-and-answer panel discussion. The following summary
is intended to serve as an aide-mémoire for those who took part and to
provide a general summary of discussions for those who did not.
http://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/public/Research/Africa/260213summary.pdf
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