The Africa Energy Bank (AEB) will become operational within weeks and begin financing projects at the start of 2027, Farid Ghezali, Secretary General of the African Petroleum Producers Organization (APPO), said during the technical panel of the GECF-AEC Strategic Forum at African Energy Week (AEW) 2026 in Cape Town. The bank, launched by APPO and Afreximbank, will use a corridor approach, prioritizing projects that deliver regional economic development across four pillars: export infrastructure, domestic infrastructure, clean cooking and power.
Ghezali said exports and domestic supply should not compete. “I come from a country where you cannot export any drop of gas if the domestic demand is not satisfied,” he said. APPO and the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) signed an agreement earlier this year to work jointly on gas corridors, and plan to harmonize transit tariffs and gas contracts across member states.
The panel focused on why domestic gas markets remain underdeveloped. Rashid Ali Abdallah, Executive Director of the African Energy Commission (AFREC), said recent investment has gone largely into export terminals while regional pipelines struggle to attract funding. He called for regional financing frameworks for cross-border infrastructure, and for joint planning of gas pipelines and power transmission.
In South Africa, industrial consumers face the loss of natural gas supply within about 18 months, with only a short-term coal supply bridge beyond that, said Jaco Human, Executive Officer of the Industrial Gas Users Association of Southern Africa (IGUA-SA). The gas aggregation company was formed to pool demand, share risk and underwrite new infrastructure across the region. Human said a proposed pipeline linking the Orange Basin to Western Cape and inland markets would need around 200 petajoules of annual demand. “We have much more demand than that, so the problem is not an economic one,” he said. “Rather, it is a coordination problem.”
Abubakar Abbas, Senior Energy Forecast Analyst at the GECF, said Africa will require at least $1 trillion over the next 30 years to develop its gas resources. Per capita energy consumption on the continent is about 25 gigajoules a year, well below the global average. Abderrezak Benyoucef, Head of Energy Studies at OPEC, said OPEC expects gas to rise from 17% to 23% of Africa’s energy mix by 2050. Electricity generation is projected to grow from under 1,000 TWh to about 2,700 TWh, with half of it from gas.
The AEB is headquartered in Abuja, where Nigeria handed over the bank’s offices to APPO and Afreximbank in February.
Distributed by APO Group on behalf of African Energy Chamber.