In the first week of February 2022, Andre de Ruyter, CEO of Eskom, gave a low down of South Africa’s electricity generation capacity.
One sentence leapt at us from the statement by the head of the country’s Power Utility.
“From a diesel perspective, Gourikwa is full, so we have full availability of diesel reserves there and at Ankerlig, we’re currently sitting at 81%”.
Gourikwa and Ankerlig are two power plants constructed as gas fired facility. But through all their 15+ years of activity, they have consumed only diesel, a far more expensive fuel. They never were once hooked on gas. It’s an abnormality that the CEO seems, from his statement, to disregard. This is big opportunity for natural gas. Who is grabbing it?
The story is positively different in Algeria, Egypt, Ghana and Tanzania, the countries we highlighted in one of our s first monthly editions of the year. While Algeria is vilified by much of western media for losing its place as a key exporter of gas to Europe, the country has increased its power sector gas burn, consuming 1.85Billion cubic feet per day (1.85Bscf/d) on domestic power generation alone in 2019. To us, that’s a great problem to have. Ghana’s gas consumption increased from 115MMscf/d in 2017 to 315MMscf/d in 20200, driven by the rise in electricity generation and while Tanzania is a much smaller gas market, the demand was stronger in 2021 than in prior years, partly due to lack of supply from hydro-electric generation
We examine the implications of these for investors, for that’s what matters.
Elsewhere, we are following up on drilling activities across the continent; energy transition updates, the current thinking on geoscience of hydrocarbon search and oilfield technology. We provide status updates on production and other market intelligence through our activity maps on Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Mozambique and Nigeria. We also publish rig activity spreadsheets on Angola and Nigeria.
We invite you to become a paying subscriber of our monthly harvest, released, in pdf format, to over 20,000 email addresses. Help yourself to a front row seat, to a clear sight to activities that should put you ahead of the competition.
The Africa Oil+Gas Report is the primer of the hydrocarbon industry on the continent. It is the market leader in local contextualizing of global developments and policy issues and is the go-to medium for decision makers, whether they be international corporations or local entrepreneurs, technical enterprises or financing institutions. Published by the Festac News Press Limited since 2001, AOGR is a paid e-copy publication delivered around the world. Its website remains www.africaoilgasreport.com, and the contact email address is info@africaoilgasreport.com. Contact telephone numbers in the West African regional headquarters in Lagos are +2348124374087, +2348130733523, +2347062420127, +2348036525979, +2348023902519.
–Editor
