By Celestine Okorie, Correspondent South Africa
The African Energy Chamber has announced the launch of the African Coalition for Trade & Investment in Natural Gas (ACTING), a non-profit initiative jointly managed with Hawilti Ltd.
ACTING will act as the central platform advocating for natural gas across Africa and will leverage on the core strengths of both the Chamber and Hawilti to promote natural gas as a transition fuel, attract capital in the African gas value-chain and engage stakeholders and societies on the benefits of natural gas consumption.
By leveraging on the Chamber’s pan-African and global network, ACTING will gather leading experts, executives and policy makers around key issues pertaining to natural gas in Africa, from upstream exploration & production, midstream infrastructure, downstream monetization and gas-to-power. The Coalition focuses on all the benefits that a broader adoption of natural gas can bring to Africans, especially when it comes to securing access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all, creating jobs and supporting industrialization.
The work of the Coalition will particularly focus on the collection of key market data and the distribution of high-quality information on opportunities, companies and projects shaping up the future of African gas. By offering the most comprehensive platform on African energy, Hawilti will be dedicating a substantial part of its investment research activities to natural gas in West, Central, East and Southern Africa. The Coalition will notably publish every year a State of Play report providing key market data on African gas, and all of its research will be directly available on the Hawilti platform.
“There is no doubt that 2020 has been a turning point for African gas. We are on the break of a true gas revolution across the continent as African nations seek to diversify their economies, decarbonize their energy mix and fully benefit from the roll out of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCTFA). We are seeing tremendous interest from regulators, investors and consumers to adopt gas on a much broader scale and produce cleaner energy, support industrialization and create jobs. ACTING will act as the vehicle accompanying all industry stakeholders on this journey,” declared Executive Chairman at the African Energy Chamber, Nj Ayuk.
“At Hawilti, we continue to believe that the lack of accurate and high-quality market data on African gas markets is a major impediment to investments and to the continent realising its full economic potential. With the launch of ACTING, we have made it a priority to gather, develop and distribute the most updated data on natural gas and develop true ESG reporting practices on African energy markets to inform policy and promote sound investment,” stated Director at Hawilti, Mickael Vogel.
ACTING believes in the promotion of transparent business practices and the adoption of sound environmental, social and corporate governance standards to promote investments across the African gas value chain. With its partners, it will be supporting a broad range of gas industries, including liquefied natural gas (LNG), liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), compressed natural gas (CNG), piped natural gas (PNG), gas-to-power and hydrogen.
