International firms eye Madagascar's oil and coal - Feature
Antananarivo - The worldwide search for new oil and gas reserves has now reached the island-state of Madagascar off of Africa's eastern coast. So far, 17 international petroleum companies are involved in a race to discover new oil fields on the world's fourth-largest island, according to media reports. The Madagascar Oil company is already pumping oil in the Tsimiroro and Bemolanga regions in the south. Meanwhile the government is considering 25 contracts for awarding production rights, six of them in offshore regions and the other 19 on the island itself. But plans are afoot to more strongly develop the tropical island's coal reserves which are estimated at 135 million tonnes. According to reports, exploitation of reserves in a 50,000-hectare area in the Betioky district south of the Atsimo Andrefana region is soon to get underway. Domestic coal would then as quickly as possible replace the environmentally-damaging charcoal, for the production of which large sections of fo...