Swala Energy (SWE) commenced listing in April of this year at a price of $0.20. Since the float, SWE experienced several months of pressure alongside many other East African based exploration companies.
Swala Energy is now trading at a $0.13 premium to its listing price (33c) and continues to show increased volume in the past several weeks of trading.
Oil & Gas in Tanzania:
Tanzania has significant hydrocarbon potential, as demonstrated already by the successful gas discoveries along the coast and – inland – through the oil seeps that suggest a hydrocarbon system analogous to that in Uganda. This exploration potential has attracted a number of companies ranging from small companies through to multi-nationals, and Tanzania remains a focus of attention for both international exploration companies and international financial investors.
There are three main hydrocarbon play systems that can be explored for oil and gas in Tanzania:
The East African Rift System (Tertiary in age) The Interior Rifts (Permian through Tertiary in age) The coastal basin (Permian through Recent age)
Both the western rifts belonging to the East African Rift System and the interior rifts (e.g. Lukomeru, Kilosa, Ruhuhu, Rukwa, Nyasa, Tanganyika and the Selous) are very poorly explored and any hydrocarbons present may be a mixture of gas and oil.
The East Africa Rift System has been attracting intensive exploration and investment activity in the last three to four years, predominantly as a result of the success of Tullow and its partners in discovering 1-2 billion barrels of oil in Uganda’s Lake Albert region.
The East African Rift System indicates where present-day Africa tried to break up when the proto-continent of Pangea split into the constituent pieces of today’s continental masses. The rift system is particularly prospective for oil because the faulting created basins within which sediments could accumulate to provide reservoirs and seals; and where high thermal gradients due to the thinner crust encourage the generation of hydrocarbons from the deposited source rocks.
The East African Rift System is as a series of linked intra-continental rift basins that extend over a distance of some 3,500 kms and are 50 to 150 km wide. It has two dominant trends: one that curves around the eastern side of Lake Victoria and extends through Kenya into Tanzania (the ‘Eastern Branch’); and one that curves along the western side of Lake Victoria and can be traced along Lake Albert through Lake Tanganyika to Lake Nyasa (the ‘western branch’).
