Ireland’s Tullow Oil and mining giant BHP Billiton are planning separate gas projects in Namibia and South Africa to help feed the region’s hunger for power.

Tullow, which operates in 11 countries, is finalising plans to develop the Kudu gasfield off Namibia’s southern coast that would feed an 800 megawatt power station onshore, vice-president Tim O’Hanlon told the African Upstream conference in Cape Town.
“Four hundred megawatts will go to the local Namibian market, that would saturate that market, and 400 megawatts will head south into South Africa, that gigantic power market with some serious shortfalls envisaged,” he said.
The Kudu gasfield, with around 1.3 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of gas, was originally discovered in the 1970s, but never developed. The Kudu project is not due to launch operations until around 2009, but Tullow is already seeking to identify further reserves by drilling two wells next year.
“The phase two can be more of the same – gas to power for again the South African market where they have 40,000 megawatts installed and they need 1,000 megawatts every year,” said O’Hanlon.
BHP Billiton is due to start drilling soon in the Orange River basin that acts as a border between South Africa and Namibia, Robert Pascoe, exploration manager for the Atlantic Basin, told the conference.
The firm, the world’s largest mining group, has around 120,000 square km of exploration area in the massive basin, about 60 per cent of the total, he said.