Statoil, BG Plan East Africa LNG Terminal

Statoil and BG Group plan to build a $10 billion East African liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal to supply the fuel to Asia, after the Norwegian company made a new find off the coast of Tanzania, Reuters reported.

'We have enough gas to move forward,' Statoil's head of exploration, Tim Dodson, was quoted by Reuters as saying on Monday after it announced the discovery of between 4 trillion and 6 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of gas in the Indian Ocean. 'We are working with BG to come up with a recommendation for a landing site. We should be making that recommendation to Tanzanian authorities fairly early in the second quarter,' Dodson told Reuters. 

The plant to be built by Statoil and BG would have at least two processing units, or trains, to process gas from Statoil's Block 2 and BG's Block 1. 'In addition to the 10-13 tcf that we have, they (BG) have a similar kind of number (in Block 1),' said Dodson. 'So if we have 20 tcf, there will be a discussion on whether you develop all of that straight away or whether you build two trains and then add a potential third train, or even a fourth.'

Statoil would extract the gas from the seabed via a big offshore development before piping it to the export terminal on land, Reuters quoted Dodson as saying.