Swala Energy Fast-Track Drilling Plan in Tanzania

Swala Energy (ASX:SWE) has accelerated its onshore oil and gas development plans in  Tanzania by engaging a drilling support contractor ahead of further exploration at the Kilosa-Kilombero and Pangani licences.

Swala’s subsidiary operator at the properties, Swala Oil and Gas (Tanzania), has awarded the Drill Support Team contract for the 2016 drilling campaign to the Tanzanian subsidiary of AWT International (Asia), a Singapore-headquartered firm offering subsurface, subsea and surface facilities engineering services and contracting solutions to the oil and gas industry.

Also Read:how-to-drill-oil-and-gas-well

The Drill Support Team will effectively act as Swala Tanzania’s drilling management team, tasked with designing the wells, implementing the planning required ahead of the wells, including the ordering of long-lead items, and primarily to engage with rig contractors (and operators) in the area to determine the optimal rig sequencing and the design and cost of the wells.

The award allows drill planning to begin immediately and sets up Swala to achieve its 2016 drilling objectives.

The Kilosa-Kilombero licence has three deep basins – Kidatu, Kilosa and Kilombero.  The Pangani licence has one – the Moshi basin.

The two projects are considered geologically related to structures which host at least 2 billion barrels of oil.

Seismic work carried out in 2013 identified a large-scale structure in the Kilosa basin, measuring some 40-50 square kilometres in extent. More importantly, it identified the “Kito” prospect in the Kilombero basin, where initial analysis suggested structural trapping analogous to that seen in Uganda (where more than 4 billion barrels of oil have been discovered to date) and Kenya (more than 600 million barrels).

A second seismic survey in 2014, concentrating on the Kilombero basin, slightly increased the size of the Kito prospect and identified a further six leads and prospects that contribute to the basin’s potential upside.

The 17,156-square-kilometre Pangani licence, meanwhile, has demonstrated the existence of in Moshi of a fault-bounded basin some 25 kilometres wide with sedimentary fill of between 2,000 -3,000 metres.  The company is still reviewing the 2014 seismic data and focusing on the Kikuletwa lead, to the west of the basin.