CAIRO (Reuters) – Egypt has cancelled its tender to rent a third natural gas import (LNG) regasification terminal as it is no longer needed, Oil Minister Tarek El Molla told Reuters on Tuesday.

“The tender to rent a third regasification terminal was cancelled due to a lack of need for it and until we reassess the gas production capacity of Egypt and the consumption levels over the next few years,” he said.

Once a net energy exporter, Egypt began importing liquefied natural gas (LNG) last year and has leased two floating and storage regasification units (FSRU) already to help avert power shortages caused by falling energy production and rising consumption.

(Reporting by Ehab Farouk; writing by Asma Alsharif; editing by Louise Heavens)

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KAMPALA (Reuters) – Uganda on Monday started up its first grid-connected, 10 megawatt solar power plant as the east African country moves to tap its renewable energy resources and expand its electricity generation capacity.

Funded by Norway, Germany, UK and the European Union, the $19 million plant was developed by Access Power and Eren Re, two energy sector investors based in Dubai and France respectively.

Uganda, a prospective crude oil producer of some 34 million people, generates about 850 megawatts of electricity, mostly from hydro power dams.

Officials have said they want to increase that capacity to 1,500 megawatts by 2018 and are seeking foreign investors to develop the country’s non-traditional energy sources such as solar and geothermal.

The plant, a vast field of some 32,600 photovoltaic panels, is located in Soroti in northeastern Uganda and the electricity generated will help power at least 40,000 homes.

Last week Uganda signed a 90 million-euro ($95.55 million)loan deal with German development bank KfW and French government finance agency AFD to build a 45 megawatt (MW) power plant in the country’s west.

($1 = 0.9419 euros)

(Reporting by Elias Biryabarema; editing by Louise Heavens)

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By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Scientists examining the jawbone of a saber-toothed, mammal-like beast that prowled Tanzania 255 million years ago have come across a remarkable fossil rarity: one of the oldest-known tumors.

University of Washington researchers on Thursday described a benign tumor composed of miniature tooth-like structures they found embedded next to the root of the creature’s enlarged canine tooth while studying an unrelated aspect of the jaw.

The animal was a member of an extinct group of four-legged carnivores called gorgonopsians that mixed mammal-like and reptile-like traits. They reached up to 10 feet (3 metres) long and appeared early in the evolutionary lineage that led to mammals. The jawbone came from one of the smaller gorgonopsian species.

Gorgonopsians were among the top predators of their time, thriving from about 270 million to 252 million years ago when they were wiped out during Earth’s worst mass extinction at the end of the Permian Period. Their demise came roughly 20 million years before the first dinosaurs.

When the researchers sliced into the mandible fossil from Tanzania’s Ruhuhu Valley, they found a benign dental tumor called a compound odontoma that grows within the gums or other jaw soft tissues. When people get one, surgery is sometimes used to remove it.

“There was no indication that there was a tumor in this jaw. It looked normal before we cut it open. It was pure luck that we found the tumor,” University of Washington paleobiologist Megan Whitney said.

Until now, this type of tumor was known only in mammals, including some Ice Age fossils tens of thousands of years old. The new discovery shows such a tumor existed in mammal ancestors that lived tens of millions of years before the first mammals appeared.

Tumors, malignant and benign, typically involve soft tissue, and rarely fossilize.

“Ancient tumors generally need to affect hard parts such as bones and teeth in order to be preserved in the fossil record,” University of Washington paleobiologist Christian Sidor added.

This tumor included hard enamel and dentin.

Few tumor fossils are older. A 300-million-year-old fish was found with a tumor and a 350-million-year-old armored fish has an apparent tumor that some dispute.

“Fossils allow us to understand the evolution of diseases in deep time and have the potential to provide clues as to the causes of diseases that afflict humans,” Whitney said.

The research appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association Oncology.

(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Peter Cooney)

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BRAZZAVILLE (Reuters) – Congo Republic expects oil output to rise to some 300,000 barrels per day in 2018, up from around 250,000 bpd now, partly due to a new deep offshore field due to come online next year, the oil minister said on Thursday.

Moho Nord, the second project issued on the Moho Bilondo offshore licence, is due to begin producing oil in March or April next year, Jean-Marc Thystere-Tchicaya told a conference in the capital Brazzaville.

“From mid-2017 we can already count on an increase in production and then reach a peak in 2018 with 300,000 barrels per day,” he said. “We hope that the cost of a barrel of crude will stabilise on the market and allow us a good budget.”

Oil accounts for around 65 percent of the Central African nation’s GDP.

Moho Nord is expected to have production capacity of 140,000 bpd, according to operator Total, which holds a 53.5 percent stake in the project. Chevron owns 31.5 percent with the remaining 15 percent held by Congo’s state oil company SNPC.

Having reversed a decline in production, Congo is on track to leapfrog Equatorial Guinea to become sub-Saharan Africa’s third-largest crude producer next year.

(Reporting by Christian Elion; Writing by Joe Bavier; Editing by Alexandra Hudson)

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