Morocco could become a player in the natural gas market by 2019, according to a new report by Interfax.
The Sound Energy Company, which focuses on projects in Africa and Europe, announced the successful drilling of the Tendrara Gas to a depth of 3,459 meters this week, according to Morocco World News.
The firm published an official report titled "Tendrara: TE-7 - Completion of Drilling and Log Results" to describe the results of the operation.
The next drilling exercise, TE-8, will prove additional volumes of gas in the field, Sound Energy contends, predicting that the site could hold anywhere in between 3 to 4 trillion cubic feet of gas.
Sound Energy also owns a 55 percent stake in the neighboring Meridja field.
Meridja and Tendrara lay within 75 miles of a special gas pipeline that connects Morocco and Algeria to the gas grids of Spain and Portugal.
Sound Energy's stocks have increased four-fold since the beginning of July due to its success in the North African kingdom.
The company's finance director Mary Hood was recently asked in a Proactive Investors interview about the size of the Moroccan find.
"Did the multi-TCF potential surprise us?" she asked hypothetically. "No, it didn't, but, what we were looking for was a commercial flow rate of say 3 to 3.5 million scuffs [standard cubic feet or 'scf'] per day, and what we've actually got from that first well, the T6 well, is a flow rate of 17mln scuffs per day."
"It definitely surpassed our expectations," she added.
Morocco is a net energy importer country that has been at the forefront of the charge towards renewable energy.
Its massive Noor solar power plant - the largest in the world - in the desert city of Ouarzazate will provide power to over a million people by the time the third phase of the project is completed in 2018.
By Zainab Calcuttawala for Oilprice.com
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Zainab Calcuttawala is an American journalist based in Morocco. She completed her undergraduate coursework at the University of Texas at Austin (Hook’em) and reports on… More