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CAPE TOWN, May 18 (Reuters) - South Africa said on Tuesday
it had hit pockets of shale gas during test drilling in the
semi-desert Karoo region.
A decade ago the Karoo sparked intense interest from
companies including Shell, Sasol and Falcon
Oil & Gas, but farmers went to court to challenge any
drilling in the ecologically-sensitive region, which saw
enthusiasm wane amid regulatory uncertainty.
"The first pocket of gas was intercepted at 1,734 metres
with a further substantial amount intercepted at 2,467 meters
spanning a depth of 55 metres," South African energy minister
Gwede Mantashe said during his budget vote in parliament.
A total of 34 gas samples had been bottled and taken to
laboratories, he said, after government's Council for
Geosciences set out to drill a 3,500 meter stratigraphic hole in
the Karoo to establish and test the occurrence of shale gas.
In 2017, geologists at the University of Johannesburg and
three other institutions estimated the gas resource in the Karoo
was probably 13 trillion cubic feet (tcf), the bottom of a range
of estimates that had put deposits between 13 tcf to 390 tcf.
In 2015, the U.S. Energy and Information Administration
(EIA) estimated the Karoo Basin’s “technically recoverable shale
gas resource” at 390 tcf, then making it the 8th largest in the
world and second largest in Africa, behind Algeria.
(Reporting by Wendell Roelf
Editing by David Goodman and Alexander Smith)
