What is needed to be achieved if Africa is going to match the growth of its oil and gas production as well as its increased demands for such energy resources? Well, the answer to this boils down to one motion – INVESTMENT; Africa needs to severely invest in its infrastructure in order to achieve this.
So what will be the positive effects if Africa can get to this point?
- Sufficient infrastructure can cut production and transactional costs;
- Allow for cheaper access to these resources for African consumers.
Africa’s entire volume of natural gas reserves are currently being projected at near 74-trillion cubic metres. This enormous statistic means that Africa ALONE is responsible for 10% of the world’s total amount of oil and gas reserves. Latest oil & gas findings in countries such as Uganda, Ghana, Tanzania and Mozambique reflects that Africa’s worldwide share of reserves are rapidly growing from about 8%, which was the figure in 2000, to nearly 13% for this year. There have been so many oil and gas reserve detections that many countries were required to re-draw sub-Saharan Africa’s oil and gas chart over the next 5 years, as this will contribute to the significant net increases in output.
Within 5 years, sub-Saharan Africa could be creating an additional 400 000 bbl/d of oil. Meaning that the sub-Saharan Africa region’s total crude output to 6.6-million barrels a day. Natural gas production is estimated to top nine-billion cubic feet per day (bcf/d) within 5 years and reach 12.7 bcf/d by 2023.
All these new and innovative detections feed Africa with excitement and enthusiasm however, some challenges that cease to exist such as infrastructure for the extraction, processing, storage and moving of the resources to market need to be dealt with. Over the past 3 years Mozambique and Tanzania have made gigantic discoveries in offshore attracting countries and businesses from all over the world. This only implies that oil and gas are going to transform into major features of these countries. Mozambique and Tanzania therefore have to plan for the improvement and development of a pulsating gas and oil economy. I can’t highlight enough that minus sufficient infrastructure; these countries would continue net importers of refined oil and gas products and therefore would remain to struggle to achieve growing fuel demand.
The hunger to invest in oil and gas infrastructure exists, but this interest is largely from foreign investors and not Africans themselves.
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