Oil & Gas

Tanzania is accelerating efforts to join the prestigious Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) exporters club. After negotiations with oil companies stalled in 2019, President Samia Suluhu Hassan has restarted them. She wants talks to conclude this year and development to start in 2023.

The East African country is desperate to unlock as much as $30bn in foreign investment but also to escape the energy transition, or the rush to decarbonize that could render its enormous gas reserves useless.

Tanzania has an estimated 57 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves but disagreements with oil corporations over production sharing disputes have kept them untapped.

The lull allowed neighboring Mozambique to press ahead, only for an Islamist insurgency in its northern Cabo Delgado province to force Total and other oil majors to abandon their gas projects.