Eni SpA, Italy's largest oil company, owns 70% of Mozambique's offshore Area 4, a large area off the East coast of Africa where last year they discovered a huge natural gas reserve in the Mamba South. They have just announced the discovery of another huge find in the Mamba complex, estimated at 212.5 billion cubic metres, bringing the total reserves found to 850 billion cubic metres of gas (30 trillion cubic feet).
CEO Paolo Scaroni claimed that the new finds are enough to warrant a liquefied natural gas plant in the country in order to process and export the fuel by tanker. Theepan Jothilingham, an analyst at Nomura Holdings Inc., reported that the gas flow is encouraging and should allow for the production of more than four million cubic metres a day (about 23,000 barrels of oil equivalent).
Area 4 is located roughly 45 kilometres of the coast of Cape Delgado and helps to confirm East Africa's status as an up and coming power in the global natural gas sector. The success of Eni's drilling in the Mamba region, has attracted other drillers such as Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Norway's Statoil ASA to explore the area all along the coast including up into to Tanzania.
Elsewhere, in the neighbouring Area 1 region Texas based Anadarko Petroleum Corp. said it has discovered gas reserves that could also yield as much as 850 billion cubic feet.
By. Charles Kennedy of Oilprice.com
Charles is a writer for Oilprice.com More