Despite the increase in incidents with pirates and the rising costs, to date these seem to have had only a limited impact on the level of oil and gas exploration off the coast of Tanzania. In fact, all of East Africa remains a high-profile hot spot for exploration. This in part reflects the fact that the prospects of a significant find off the shore of Tanzania seem to have increased in the last year, as highlighted by the announcement by Dominion Petroleum in early April that it had been granted a one-year extension to the initial exploration period on Block 7, until May 2012, to evaluate more fully its prospects. In September 2010 Dominion had announced that there was a potential hydrocarbon resources of 7trn cu ft of gas and 1.1bn barrels of oil in the block; while at roughly the same time Ophir Energy also announced that they had made a new gas discovery on its Chaza-1 exploration well. This adds to the discoveries made in the last year at its Chewa and Pweza wells and, as Orphir noted in its press release, raises the prospect that there could be sufficient quantities of gas to allow the processing and export of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Tanzania.

Given these developments, there was some disappointment from international oil companies at the April 11th decision by the Tanzanian Petroleum Development Corporation (TPDC) to postpone its planned fourth licensing round from April to some time in 2012. This was to have offered an additional 13 blocks, in addition to the 17 onshore and offshore blocks currently being explored in the country. The TPDC argued that the delay will allow it to more clearly demark the new blocks using additional seismic data, although there is also the possibility that a major find between now and then will increase the value of the bids on the new blocks.