Gas major BG Group says it has made a second major discovery off Tanzania, taking its resources in the country to around 15 trillion cubic feet.
The company said it now believed the Mzia discovery drilled this year contained around 4.7trillion cubic feet of recoverable resources.
The news comes less than a week after Statoil and ExxonMobile confirmed their fifth major find off the East African country.
BG Group’s announcement adds a further 2tcf to their previous estimates for the region – around the same amount needed to supply the UK for a year – with the possibility of more to come next year.
The company completed appraisal work on the third well of its Mzia field, finding deeper resources of a similar quality to its previous two wells.
The new results mean a 100% record for BG Group off the Tanzanian coast over the last three years, with nine consecutive discoveries.
Now BG Group is set to begin a two-train liquefied natural gas project to handle the new finds and begin processing.
“We have sufficient resources for a two-train LNG project in Tanzania,” said BG Group chief executive Chris Finlayson.
“The aim of our appraisal programme now is to optimise the future development plan and place the most economic gas into the proposed project first to extract the most value across the chain.”
“Onshore, BG Group and its partner Ophir Energy, together with the partners in Block 2, Statoil and ExxonMobil, are continuing to make good progress in the assessment of a multi-train LNG project.
“We look forward to the Tanzanian government’s announcement of a decision on the location of an onshore site for an export facility.”
Last week Statoil and ExxonMobil revealed they had made a further find off Tanzania of up to 3trillion cubic feet of gas, bringing the total discovered over five blocks by the companies to 20trillion.