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Nigeria-based Riverside LNG said it’s in talks to supply gas to South Africa, in what would be the first such deal between the two countries.
The company 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, Chief Executive Officer of Riverside LNG, David Ige said in an interview with Bloomberg.
Nigeria has Africa’s largest gas reserves.
“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 state-owned Nigeria National Petroleum Corp.
“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 northwest Europe and to the Caribbean and South America broadly.”
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 LNG. 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.
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