West Africa must look to her gas sector potentials for strategic development
West Africa holds hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas under its soil, enough to power itself for decades, not to mention hundreds of billions of dollars in exports to power hungry nations across the globe.
Report indicates that until recently, high costs related to exploration and production combined with low prices, limited the economic feasibility of many natural gas projects across the West Africa region.
That according to industry close watchers may be a thing of the past as new technological developments through offshore floating liquefaction infrastructure have made the exploitation and transport of those resources much cheaper and quicker to implement.
With major discoveries in Gabon and Senegal, added to the major reserves held by Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea has made it even more evident that Natural gas is not a resource to be ignored.
In the summation of not a few industry close watchers, as these developments take place, the global export market seems to be headed to a situation of oversupply.
To them, the shale gas boom in the United States represented not only the loss of a considerable consumer for West African natural gas but also the emergence of a competing Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) exporter.
Recent finding reveals that West African natural gas production has been almost exclusively directed at exports to the United States and Europe, markets where it is becoming ever harder to compete.
It is therefore against this backdrop that Industry experts insist that West African nations must look inwards to make the best of the scenario in front of them, they need to look to the regions’ own market and promote the development of a natural gas-based market that could be the cornerstone of economic growth.
They further opine that the utilisation of natural gas can profoundly transform the region and the lives of its citizens adding that across the region, people and industries still suffer with lack of access to electricity or poor and unreliable connections, despite the vast amount of resources we have.
Gas-to-power projects could come a long way in addressing much of the region’s electricity shortfalls, but it will also fulfil the fundamental roll of environmental protection, as it is a much cleaner source of power than diesel.
Beyond that, analysts maintain that the use of natural gas would allow nations to cut down on the extremely expensive effort of importing refined oil products from other parts of the world.
A shift in the paradigm of power generation and gas utilization across the region could spur extensive economic development and create hundreds of thousands of jobs.
To them, the investment in natural gas fired power plants and transport infrastructure witnessed in the last few years has made the internal market for natural gas consumption grow significantly within the West African domestic market.
A country like Ivory Coast is growing increasingly dependent on natural gas to fuel its expansive gas-to-power programme. Also, offshore reserves that had, for decades, been deemed too expensive to extract, are progressively being made feasible.
New technologies are making the development of natural gas transport infrastructure more economical. Equatorial Guinea’s success with the Fortuna FLNG development is another resounding example of the impact of these new technological solutions across the region.
KELECHI EWUZIE