Experts studying data on oil exploration
Convivium 2000 executive director, Alfonso Ippolito (centre) confers with Mr Giueppe De Ruvo, and Mega Management Limited managing director, Richard Ogwel at the three-day International Investment Conference that ended yesterday at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre, Nairobi.
Oil experts from the Ministry of Energy, and a parastatal affiliated to it, are in Australia to interpret data on oil prospects in Kenya.
Two officers from the National Oil Corporation of Kenya (NOCK) and one from the ministry are in Australia where the analysis is taking place are expected to complete the exercise in the next three months, a geologist from the oil parastatal has said.
Senior geologist, Peter Thuo, said implementation of the findings of the analysis could also take place by the year 2005.
In a presentation before members of the Petroleum Institute of East Africa (PIEA) at the Grand Regency Hotel on Thursday, Mr Thuo said: "We must encourage more exploration which will eventually be rewarded with commercial discoveries of oil and gas in East Africa."
He said sedimentary basins of East Africa where there are oil exploration blocks occur in settings similar to those of the world's most prolific oil producers.
He noted that there were already gas discoveries in Songo Songo area of Tanzania. PIEA chairman, Varun Sharma, reported that commercialisation of the gas discoveries was already taking place.
Meanwhile, the Government wants to scale down the size of oil exploration blocks to make them cheaper and encourage more exploration in Kenya, a Ministry official told the meeting.
Speaking on behalf of the ministry's Chief geologist, Don Riaroh, Superintending geologist, Hudson Andambi, said this would, for example, reduce the size of Mandera district exploration blocks from their current huge size of 52,000 square kilometres.
NOCK has blocks available for exploratory drilling in the Mandera basin of the Rift Valley, and the Southern Lamu area – the latter is the only block that is both onshore and offshore.
"NOCK is going to be given adequate funding to enable it acquire more data relating to oil in the country," Mr Andambi said.
So far, years of exploration have failed to yield oil deposits in sufficient quantities as to make them commercially viable. Africa's richest oil deposits today are in West, North and Southern Africa.
Recent records indicate that just 30 exploratory oil wells have been at a cost of some $1.6 million.
