LONDON (ShareCast) - (ShareCast News) - TomCo Energy announced on Thursday that it has raised £0.6m gross by way of a placing of 20 million new ordinary shares at a price of 3p each.
The AIM-traded firm also announced that Christopher Brown had provided a further unsecured loan of £50,000.

It said the loan, which was in addition to and on the same terms as the loan of £0.1m provided by Brown in late March, and the £0.1m loan provided by Brown in early January, would incur interest of 8% per annum, payable monthly in arrears, and was repayable in full on 31 March 2019, or earlier at the company's election.

The placing was conditional only upon admission of the placing shares to trading on AIM.

"Further to the announcements of 9 April and 11 April, the company will utilise the net proceeds of the Fundraise to fund TurboShale, the company's 80% subsidiary, through to the completion of the proposed field test programme," TomCo's board said in its statement.

"The field test programme is expected to commence on site in August and is expected to take four to six months to complete, and is expected to cost approximately £0.5m.

"In addition, the company intends to explore asset level financing as a potential way of reducing costs."

TomCo said it would comprise the re-running of the historical test programme in order to obtain data to confirm the validity and efficacy of TurboShale's technology in TomCo's Holliday Block for extracting oil shale on a commercial basis.

That would be based on a historical programme conducted by a group of oil majors in the early 1980s, with the ultimate goal being to move towards production on the Holliday Block leases.

"The company looks forward to updating shareholders in due course."

Funds from the fundraise would also provide additional working capital to the company in the short term, the board explained.

The directors said they believed that the form had sufficient working capital through to at least October, although completion of the field test programme was expected to require additional funding.

They said they were confident that such funding would be available at the appropriate time, although there was no guarantee that such funding would be available.

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