Tanzania to hold exploration licensing round in October

Tanzania plans to hold an oil and gas exploration licensing round in October at which it will offer seven deep offshore blocks and one onshore block to explorers, state-run Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation said.

TPDC said in an undated notice on its website that the round was a revival of an auction slated for September 2012 that was postponed as Tanzania formulated a new oil and gas policy. 

U.S. oil boom to help meet new global demand

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has predicted that the U.S. shale oil will help meet most of the world's new oil demand in the next five years, even if the global economy picks up steam, leaving the need for OPEC crude barely changed from today's levels.

The prediction by the International Energy Agency (IEA) came in its closely watched semi-annual report, which analyses mid-term global oil supply and demand trends.

It said it expected global oil demand to rise 8 percent between 2012 and 2018 to reach 96.7 million barrels per day (bpd) based on a fairly optimistic International Monetary Fund's global economic growth assumption of between 3.0 and 4.5 percent a year during the period.That incremental demand will be mainly met by non-OPEC production, which will rise by more than 10 percent between 2012 and 2018 to 59.31 million bpd, the IEA said, increasing its estimate of non-OPEC supply in 2017 by 1 million bpd versus its previous report in October 2012. That will leave OPEC, which had been long seen as the last resort for the world to meet rising demand, with output fluctuating around the current levels of 30 million bpd for the next five years.

NNPC Unveils $16bn Gas Infrastructure Programme

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has said preliminary works on the gas infrastructure development project which is expected to attract about $16 billion worth of investment to the proposed Ogidingbe gas-based industrial park will commence next month.

According to the Group Executive Director, Gas and Power of the NNPC, Dr. David Ige, who provided a timeline of activities for the project at the recently concluded Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) in Houston-Texas, United States, work is envisaged to commence on the Ogidingbe Free Trade Zone (FTZ) with the full infrastructure development and Pre-Front End Engineering Design (FEED) of the Central Processing Facilities (CPFs) in June this year.

Ige in a statement from the acting General Manager Public Affairs of NNPC, Tumini Green, explained that the Final Investment Decision (FID) for the CPFs was however expected to be achieved in June 2014.

He noted that by January 2015, construction work on the CPFs would begin while work on the real estate development of the Ogidingbe area which will service the industrial park would begin in March 2015 and erection works at the petrochemical complex was also slated to commence between 2016 and 2017.