National oil company PetroSA says African governments need to co-operate in order to be able to develop the gas sector. Chairperson Nhlanhla Gumede was speaking at the fourth Africa Oil and Power Conference in Cape Town.
He says Mozambique and Tanzania have a recent combined find of at least 200 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, but do not currently have the necessary infrastructure to exploit the energy source.
“Gas you either liquefy and then send somewhere else or you put it in a pipeline and send somewhere else, same as electricity, it’s very difficult to store that kind of energy, so what we would want to do is to have joint development between countries. Ideally what we would like to have is an established gas network, we need to be able to link the energy source with the energy demand points. Imagine going out and looking for something, finding it and not finding a market, imagine finding something and not finding the infrastructure to bring your product to the market , that is the challenge with gas,” says Gumede.
