Tanzania plans to launch in May its fifth oil and gas licensing round for 26 exploration blocks in what will be the East African country’s first such bidding round since 2014.
“We are proceeding with promotion activities because the blocks have already been identified and the data is in place,” Charles Sangweni, director general of Tanzania’s Petroleum Upstream Regulatory Authority (PURA), told Bloomberg in an interview published on Thursday.
Of the 26 exploration blocks on offer, three are in Lake Tanganyika and the rest are located in the Indian Ocean.
Tanzania aims to launch the new bid round at the Africa Energies Summit event in London in the middle of May, the official said.
Tanzania is believed to contain massive natural gas resources, which are estimated at 57 trillion cubic feet.
Tanzania also has a planned $42-billion LNG export project, but progress on this stalled early last year as supermajors Shell and Equinor were still expecting the signing of all agreements which would allow them to start developing the project.
The LNG project for connecting offshore natural gas discoveries offshore Tanzania with an export terminal on its coast has been nearly a decade in the making.
After buying BG Group in 2016, Shell became the operator of two offshore blocks in Tanzania, Block 1 and Block 4, together with its partners Medco Energi (Ophir Energy) and Pavilion Energy. A total of 16 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of natural gas have been discovered in the blocks.
Equinor, for its part, started exploration drilling activities in Block 2 offshore Tanzania in 2011 and has made nine discoveries with estimated volumes of more than 20 Tcf of gas in place.
Last month, Energy Minister Doto Biteko said that Tanzania hopes the negotiations with the project developers on tax incentives would conclude by June this year.