Massive gas opportunities beckon
Muzarabani-Mbire gas and oil condensate prospects will bring major gas processing and oil refining companies to Muzarabani, Geo Associates chief executive Mr Paul Chimbodza said this week.
Downstream economic activities which will follow the commercial discovery of natural gas and oil condensates will see major power stations using the cleaned gases, shipping by pipeline fractions of the natural gas to fertiliser factories and refining of the condensates into petrol and diesel.
Other economic activities in the area have to include setting up of storage facilities, logistics and transport of the gas and oil products. While some of the downstream use and processing may be done elsewhere, a great deal will be cheaper and more efficiently done near the well heads, turning Muzarabani into a major industrial centre and creating a lot of local employment.
For example it makes more sense to build a proposed gas power station at Muzarabani and extending the backbone grid to that station, rather than laying a pipeline and pumping gas uphill to a station on the high-veld. In any case, even when product is moved elsewhere, it still needs to be cleaned and separated near the wells.
This fits in with the Government’s devolution agenda and will place a lot of responsibility on the local district and provincial administrations to ensure that the development is correctly sited to avoid pollution and other dangers and that the maximum benefit from everything from the new housing upwards is done close to the resource.
Speaking in Muzarabani recently Mr Chimbodza said downstream activities that will follow the commercial discovery will be domiciled within this province. “The enablers to downstream activities which include water will be drawn from this province.
provinces will be our customers and support this project,” he said.“We will work closely with the provincial governance structures to make sure that in case of a commercial discovery it will automatically transcend the success of the provincial devolution agenda.”
Invictus Energy managing director Mr Scott MacMillan said there was no guarantee of success in their exploration work but Invictus were not planning to pack their bags and leave should they fail to find the resource.
“What we are trying to do as a company is to leave a legacy even if we are not successful. We are doing this through community social responsibility programmes,” he said. “We want to leave this community better than we found it and make a positive, long term contribution to the community.”
Mr MacMillan said if they were not successful in their drilling, that is dry wells were the result, the company would immediately assess the result to understand why that happened.
“We will try to understand the source rock which generates the oil and gas. In its accumulation there is a reservoir and seal which prevents it from leaking up to the surface,”
he said. “All these elements work together to form oil and gas accumulation. When we start to drill the wells in June or July, we will be able to get much more detailed information as to the reason for any failure.
“Information from the wells will enable us to gather detailed information on rock formations and enable us to calibrate our seismic data.
“At the moment we are only taking ultra sounds of the earth but nothing is individualised from what we are seeing. Using the seismic data, we will assess if there are other potential areas in the basin. It will not be a complete right-off.” Invictus Energy vice chairman Mr Joe Mutizwa applauded the tremendous support they received from the Government, stakeholders and the local community since 2017.
He promised to do their best to promote Zimbabwe given the chance of commercial oil and gas discovery.