Nigeria and other African countries are shifting their focus to natural gas in the energy transition amid fears that energy supply could be threatened.
During the Africa Oil Week conference in Dubai, Africa energy ministers said African nations would depend heavily on fossil fuels like natural gas to drive the energy transformation.
Although the 55 African countries contribute to only four per cent of the world’s total emissions, they are being told to change their energy transition policies when most of them are even struggling with basic necessities, such as electricity.
“When we say energy transition, it does not exactly apply to Africa. Our agenda is access to reliable and affordable energy,” the commissioner for infrastructure and energy of the African Union Commission, Amani Abou-Zeid, said during the conference.
“In addition to working to reduce emissions, we need the support of investors because we need to exploit gas and we need more financing for that,” Senegal’s minister of petroleum and energies, Aissatou Sophie Gladima, concurred.
According to the African Energy Commission, almost 40 per cent of global new gas reserves in the last ten years were discovered in Africa, mainly Senegal, Mauritania, Mozambique, Tanzania, with 17 countries producing gas.
“As African countries, we have just started to discover our own fossil fuels. So, the big question for us is; how we move along this dynamic of energy transition while optimizing the use of our fossil fuels,” Mauritania’s minister of petroleum, mines, and energy, Abdessalam Saleh said.
Earlier this month, Nigeria committed to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2060 and President Muhammadu Buhari highlighted the importance of gas as a transition fuel.
