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Senegal discusses gas-to-power plans
SENEGAL
SENEGAL’S Petroleum and Energy Minister Mahamadou Makhtar Cisse said last week that his country was keen to use its offshore reserves of natural gas as fuel for electricity generation.
Speaking at an energy industry conference in Paris, Cisse said that production from Senegal’s own gas fields would “principally be used for gas- to-power [projects].”
The country will build a gas pipeline network covering about 450km to facilitate transporta- tion from offshore fields to domestic consumers, he said.
He also acknowledged that his country was not in a position to pursue gas-to-power schemes right away. Senegal will begin by using imported LNG as fuel for thermal power plants (TPPs) and then switch to domestic gas production around 2022, when new fields are due to come online, he said.
These new fields are known as SNE and Grand Tortue-Ahmeyim. The first is a block where Australia’s Woodside Petroleum is serving as operator, and the second will see BP leading development. Senegal is in talks with partners on how to raise $2bn to cover its share of investment in these two sites. It has also opened up bidding
for 12 new offshore blocks.
Cisse did not specify how much LNG or pipe-
line gas Senegal might consume in the future. He did note, though, that gas would replace coal and petroleum products as fuel for the West African state’s TPPs.
Switching to gas will benefit the Senegalese economy in the long run, he added. Domestic gas supplies will be cheaper than imported coal or refined fuel, so they will help bring production costs down, he explained. In turn, he said, lower production costs will make the country more attractive to investors, especially those pursuing industrial projects.
Affordable domestic gas will also encourage the construction of new TPPs, he asserted. Sen- egal currently has about 1,200 MW of installed capacity and hopes to add another 1,000 MW within the next five years, he said. All of the new capacity will come from private sector projects, he noted.
Currently, coal and petroleum product-burn- ing TPPs account for around 70% of Senegal’s power-generating capacity. The remaining 30% is split between solar, with 22%, and hydropower, with 8%.
South Africa’s DNG preparing to start LNG bunkering
SOUTH AFRICA
SOUTH African infrastructure company DNG Energy has said this week that it will start LNG bunkering operations in Algoa Bay in the second quarter of 2020. The move comes as the Interna- tional Maritime Organisation (IMO) prepares to bring new rules to reduce sulphur emissions from marine fuel from January 1, 2020. The introduction of the rules is expected to lead to a rise in the use of LNG as a marine fuel.
Algoa Bay is South Africa’s largest bunkering port, located on one of the world’s busiest trad- ing routes. The company said in a November 20 statement that 56,000 vessels per year transit the region, and that its plan will improve access to LNG bunkers for commercial vessels on this route.
DNG’s plans for Algoa Bay include a 160,000 cubic metre floating LNG (FLNG) storage facil- ity and an 8,000-tonne LNG bunker barge, con- struction of which was commissioned in South African Shipyards in 2018. The vessel is the larg- est by weight to be built on the African continent to date.
DNG is planning to harness Africa’s abun- dant natural gas reserves to use as feedstock for its bunkering operations.
“The shipping industry faces significant chal- lenges in meeting global sulphur regulations from 2020, as well as ambitious decarbonisation and wider sustainability targets towards 2050,” DNG’s founder and CEO, Aldworth Mbalati, said.
“It is increasingly evident that LNG as a marine fuel has an important role to play on this pathway,” he added. “As a major global maritime hub, the development of LNG bunkering infra- structure in Algoa Bay is therefore a natural step in expanding Africa’s LNG value chain, directly supporting the growth of LNG-fuelled shipping on multiple trade routes and delivering against the industry’s, as well as Africa’s, sustainability goals.”
DNG is investing over $5bn by 2020 in infra- structure programmes across South Africa, Nigeria and Mozambique as part of its wider LNG development strategy.
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w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 47 28•November•2019
