Let’s race to develop natural gas reserves

IN east Africa, Tanzania is accelerating efforts to join the prestigious Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) exporters club.

After negotiations with oil companies stalled in 2019, President Samia Suluhu Hassan has revived them. She wants talks to conclude this year and development to start in 2023.

The east African country is desperate to unlock as much as US$30 billion in foreign investment and also to escape the energy transition, or the rush to decarbonise that could render its enormous gas reserves useless.

Tanzania has an estimated 57 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves, but production sharing disputes with oil corporates have kept them untapped.

The lull allowed neighbouring Mozambique to press ahead, only for an Islamist insurgency in its northern Cabo Delgado province to force Total and other oil companies to abandon their gas projects.

Unlike Tanzania which is an aspiring gas producer, Egypt is a more experienced one.

The country has announced that construction of a new gas pipeline in its western desert has begun. The facility is expected to pump 15 million cubic feet of gas per day.

Last year, the north African country witnessed eight new discoveries of natural gas, two in the Mediterranean and six in the western desert, adding an estimated 600 billion cubic feet of new reserves.

These developments might be crucial in the long run, as the authorities decided on hiking fuel prices for the third time this year.

Lack of vast expanses of land for agriculture and the threat of pests and diseases is pushing farmers in Togo’s cities to turn to greenhouses to grow vegetables.

This way, crops are protected from the vagaries of nature through carefully managed conditions that support plant life.

In Zimbabwe, we have the Muzarabani and Lupane gas projects, which we are failing to make heads or tail of their progress. Natural Gases