Bid to turn Africa into a ‘gas station’

Sharm el-Sheikh – Wealthy Western nations facing an energy crunch are eyeing natural gas in Africa at the expense of supporting green transition in poorer countries, climate activists at COP27 claimed.

European countries have been scrambling for alternative sources of gas after the continent’s former top supplier, Russia, slashed exports in apparent retaliation for Western sanctions over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February.

Gas-rich Norway has since overtaken Russia as a leading supplier, but Europe sees potential in African fossil fuels, including promising oil and gas discoveries in Senegal and Democratic Republic of Congo.

Europe wants “to turn Africa into its gas station,” Mohamed Adow, director of the Power Shift Africa think tank, said at the UN climate summit in Egypt.

Exporting natural gas may bring short-term profits but exacerbate the climate crisis and leave African nations worse off in the long run, activists, researchers and advocacy groups said.

Research group Climate Action Tracker called the global dash for gas a “serious threat” to the Paris Agreement goals of keeping global warming well below 2°C, and preferably at 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels.

Some African leaders argued the potential benefits for people on the poorest continent outweighed the harm from the production and export of fossil fuels.

“We are in favour of a just and fair green transition, instead of decisions that harm our development process,” Senegalese President Macky Sall told about 100 world leaders last week at COP27. Germany – the European country most dependent on Russian supplies before the war – has been keen to tap Senegal’s gas deposits.

Omar Farouk Ibrahim, secretary-general of the African Petroleum Producers’ Organisation, said the slight increase in the continent’s marginal contribution to greenhouse gas emissions “would make a fundamental difference in whether people live or die”.

“We have 600 million people in Africa who don’t have access to electricity at all. We have over 900 million people in Africa who do not have access to modern forms of energy for cooking or domestic heating,” he said. “No progress can be made without energy.”

But advocacy groups were not convinced Africa’s poor would reap any benefits. “History shows us that... extraction in African countries has not resulted in development,” said Thuli Makama, African programme director at Oil Change International.

Makama, a lawyer from Eswatini, said the Ukraine war would trigger “short-term” demand from Western nations, leaving Africa with infrastructure that becomes obsolete as the world turns to renewables. –