By Bisola Adeyemo
After negotiations with oil companies stalled in 2019, Tanzania President, Samia Suluhu Hassan is set to join the prestigious Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) exporters club 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.
Abdulsamad Abdulrahim, the chair of the Tanzania Association of Oil and Gas Service Providers (ATOGS) joins us from Dar es Salaam to talk more about the new momentum in the country’s gas ambitions.
