State oil, gas agencies sign cooperation pact

Unguja. Six institutions owned by the Union and Zanzibar governments have inked a cooperation agreement on research and experience-sharing in the business of oil and natural gas.

The pact involves the Petroleum Upstream Regulatory Authority (Pura), Zanzibar Petroleum Regulatory Authority (ZPRA), Energy and Water Utility Regulatory Authority (Ewura) and the Zanzibar Utilities Regulatory Authority (Zura).

Others are the Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation (TPDC) and the Zanzibar Petroleum Development Corporation (ZPDC).

The Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Energy, Mr Felchesmi Mramba, said the move aims at improving and strengthening the country’s development.

“The government has been conducting oil and gas (hydrocarbon) exploration and a lot of achievements have been recorded in Tanzania Mainland where about 57 trillion cubic feet of natural gas have been discovered,” he said.

He said there were signs that more oil and gas would be discovered in different parts of Tanzania and Zanzibar as explorations were still ongoing.

He said the cooperation among the institutions would enable them to collectively make more progress.

“This is the major issue that has prompted us to sign this cooperation agreement. We want to share knowledge and skills as well as exchanging experiences, statistics and other areas that would enable the institutions to move forward faster,” he said.

Submitting an expatriate’s report, the Permanent Secretary for the Zanzibar’s ministry of Water, Energy and Minerals, Mr Mgereza Miraj, said that, although the institutions had been working together in a number of areas, the signed pact turns their cooperation into legally binding regime.

He said the ministries made the decision to ink papers to formalize existing cooperation that will help in national petrol corporations, building expertise capacity as well as in exchange of technology and experts.

He named the other area as experience sharing in processing, translating and storage of data related to exploration, development and production of oil and natural gas natural resources.

Regarding Ewura and Zura, he said since the institutions share the regulation responsibilities on either side of the union, their cooperation would focus on providing expatriate consultancy during the preparation of regulatory tools and experience sharing.