A Nigeria based gas production firm, Riverside LNG, has said it is in talks to supply gas to South Africa in what would be the first such deal between the two countries.
Riverside LNG had earlier this year signed a gas-export partnership agreement with Johannes Schuetze Energy Import AG of Germany and is now looking for deals on the continent, the Chief Executive Officer of the firm, David Ige, said in an interview with Bloomberg.
Nigeria has Africa’s largest gas reserves, as the country has about 206 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves, making it a nation with more gas reserves than oil.
“We’d probably very early in the year close out another segment of the market, an off-take for South Africa,” said Ige, a former executive at the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, now known as Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited.
“There’s a massively evolving gas market in the region, anything around 3,000 nautical miles of Nigeria. So that covers Southern Africa, Western Africa, all to North-West Europe and to the Caribbean and South America broadly,” Ige added.
South Africa faces chronic power outages with the country’s old and poorly maintained power stations, unable to keep up with demand.
South Africa currently doesn’t have a facility to receive Liquefied Natural Gas. Deliveries from the project won’t start until 2027, so there’s “enough time for import terminal infrastructure,” Ige said.
The country relies on coal for four-fifths of its power generation, but with investments unlikely in the sector, it is now looking at renewable sources to generate as much as 60 gigawatt of its power needs by 2030.
The Federal Government and private operators in the oil and gas sector have been making efforts to ramp up gas production in-country.
On December 21, 2023, for instance, the government stated that the importation of Liquefied Petroleum Gas, popularly called cooking gas, would reduce after the Christmas break, as the Port Harcourt refinery would start pumping out refined products.
The Minister of State Petroleum Resources (Gas), Ekperikpe Ekpo, had stated that the Port Harcourt refinery would produce cooking gas, adding that this would lead a reduction in the importation of the commodity.
