(Reuters) - Australian-listed Invictus Energy said on
Friday it had not found oil and gas deposits in northern Zimbabwe but there
were indications of a “working petroleum system” which could only be confirmed
by a planned exploration well.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa told reporters on Thursday
that Invictus had found oil and gas deposits in the Muzarabani area and had
agreed to enter a production sharing arrangement with Zimbabwe once the project
reached commercial production.
But in a statement to the Australian Stock Exchange,
Invictus tampered Zimbabwe’s expectations of an oil bonanza saying “an oil or
gas discovery has not been made.”
“The prospective resource estimate for the Muzarabani
prospect relates to undiscovered accumulations which have both a risk of
discovery and a risk of development,” said Invictus.
“Although the Cabora Bassa Basin possess all the elements
for a working petroleum system, a discovery can only be confirmed through
drilling of an exploration well.”
Zimbabwean-born Invictus Managing Director Scott MacMillan
attended Mnangagwa’s news conference on Thursday.
Mines Minister Winston Chitando said the well would be sunk
in 2020 at a cost of $20 million and said the Muzarabani project was the
largest undrilled onshore resource in Africa.
Invictus, which is an independent oil and gas exploration
firm whose only asset is in Zimbabwe, is using data first generated by Mobil
Oil during its studies in the 1990s.
Chitando said Invictus had made more progress than Mobil
because it had a better knowledge of the Muzarabani basin which had a similar
geological structure to Uganda and Kenya, where oil has been discovered.
The southern African nation is suffering from a dollar
crunch that has seen shortages of fuel and a spike in prices of basic goods in
recent weeks. (Reporting by MacDonald Dzirutwe Editing by Edmund Blair)
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