Canada explores oil in northern Tanzania's East African Rift Valley

By The guardian reporter

Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation (TPDC) Managing Director, Dr James Mataragio

 Canada and Tanzania have started conducting preliminary exploration of oil and gas in the Rift Valley north of the country.

 

The development was made public earlier this week by the Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation (TPDC) Managing Director, Dr James Mataragio when he was introducing the project partner Canada based C-GGSU to stakeholders. 

 C-GGSU started the USD14million exploration and has already done similar studies in Asian countries and the United States of America.

 

The TPDC official said that the area of study is a 23-km long belt of the Rift Valley on the Tanzanian side.

 

The study will involve blocks located in the natural alkaline soda lakes which are in the series of the East Africa Rift Valley lakes, located in Northern Tanzania such as Lake Eyasi, Manyara and Lake Natron. 

“All these are lakes that fall within the East African Great Rift valley, which have the characteristics of having oil as Uganda’s lake Albert and Kenya’s Turkana,” he explained.

 

He said the study is to get information on the availability of oil and gas and after this study, other more detailed studies will be carried-out for similar purposes.

 

“Under this study, a well-equipped aircraft will be deployed to collect the required information. This will be flying at an altitude of between 80 metres and 100 metres above the sea level, with the speed of 220km/hour,” he said to which the C-CGG project manager, Brett Robson intoned that in the earlier stages, six experts and two pilots will be involved.