East Africa could become the world’s next oil and gas export hub by 2020, according to a new report
An Evaluate Energy report said that there were three countries with ambitions to make this a reality — Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania.
“If even one of these countries achieves its goals, the impact on the global oil and gas industry would be very significant indeed,” it added.
The report mentioned that it has been the western and northern countries in the continent that have produced the most oil and gas.
However, Angola has changed dramatically since 2000 and was the only country in the last 25 years to have increased production from under 500bn barrels per day to rival the continent’s biggest four producing countries — Algeria, Nigeria, Libya and Egypt, Evaluate Energy said.
Egypt is reportedly the only one of the big producers to import more oil than it exports. Angola comes next in the continent. The country exports 1.7mn more barrels of oil than it imports each day. Angola also has an LNG export terminal with a capacity to export 5.2mn tonnes of LNG per year, that became operational in June 2013.
Recent developments in the exploration and production industry in three East African countries — Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania — have laid a possible foundation for one or maybe some of these countries to follow in Angola’s footsteps on the path to exporting oil and gas on a major scale. This would end a 20+ year period of relative status-quo on the continent, the report stated.
