Everything I’ve been working on in energy security, this week just became a great deal more urgent. Israel struck Iran’s South Pars gas field on Wednesday, the largest gas field in the world which led to retaliatory strikes by Iran hitting Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, home to the world’s largest LNG export complex, causing extensive damage. This had the obvious result of Brent crude surging past $107 a barrel. European gas benchmarks jumped 6% in a single day and Qatar suspended LNG, which is Liquefied Natural Gas, production. All this while the world just lost access to a significant chunk of global gas supply, overnight.
Over the last week, all I’ve heard, in meetings, in news articles, even over coffee with a friend, is that Africa is Europe’s energy lifeline.
It sounds urgent. Hopeful. Almost heroic.
With gas prices spiking and instability flaring across the Middle East, everyone’s looking for a saviour. Russia’s gas is available, yes but it comes with its own set of complications. So while the world and Europe were scrambling at first, they’re now scrambling in panic. The Gulf doesn’t just have oil; it also has gas. And that gas fuels industries all over the world. Here’s the number that keeps rattling around in my head: 21% of the world’s LNG flows through a single chokepoint, the Strait of Hormuz. This is the chokepoint everyone was already worried about. Now add active strikes on the gas fields themselves. The scramble for alternatives just went from urgent to existential. And Africa is the only continent with the reserves, the proximity to Europe, and crucially, no active war on its infrastructure. So everyone is looking for an alternative. And Africa keeps coming up.
So, I spent the week deep in Africa’s energy sector: reading reports, calling analysts, scrolling through energy and shipping trackers, listening to ministers’ speeches, and rewatching every interview I could find. But all I wanted to know is Africa actually the fix?
Well. There’s a catch. And honestly, the gap between what Africa could be doing and what it’s actually set up to do right now is wilder than I expected. I had no idea, when I started working on this story, that the gas fields in the Middle East would be literally on fire by the time I wrote this entry.
What just happened in the Gulf and why Africa is suddenly everything?
Here’s what I need you to understand about South Pars: it’s not just any gas field. It’s the largest natural gas field on the planet, shared between Iran and Qatar. Qatar calls its side the North Field. When Israel struck Iran’s facilities there on March 18th, in a move coordinated with the Trump administration, it triggered an immediate chain reaction.
Iran’s response was swift. Within hours, missiles hit Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, the facility that processes and exports most of Qatar’s LNG to the world. Qatar expelled Iran’s military attachés. Trump claimed on Truth Social that Israel acted alone, then threatened to “massively blow up” the entire South Pars field if Iran struck Qatar again. US and Israeli officials confirmed the attack was, in fact, coordinated all along. –confirmed
Why African gas is suddenly the hottest thing on the market
Chatting to Menzi Ndlovu, Lead Country Risk Analyst at Signal Risk, this week, he was refreshingly blunt about it. The Gulf instability had already injected what he called “significant uncertainty” over the availability of oil and gas throughout the world, causing shocks in global supply that translated directly into financial market shocks. That uncertainty had given African energy projects a kind of urgency they’d never quite had before.
“ And as you know the Gulf is a hub for oil and gas and various other inputs in productive processes, but oil and gas in particular, most countries that are net energy importers. And so what that has done is pose significant uncertainty over the availability of oil and gas and various other inputs throughout the entire world, given the amount of oil and gas that these countries account for and that has caused a shock in global supply which is also translated to a shock in financial markets.”
— Menzi Ndlovu, Lead Country Risk Analyst, Signal Risk
The numbers back this up. Africa already accounts for over 11% of global LNG exports and that share is set to grow. The continent sits on an estimated 620 trillion cubic feet of proven gas reserves, nearly 10% of the global total. And the geography is a genuine structural advantage that no other major supplier can match: LNG carriers from West Africa reach European terminals in 8 to 12 days. From Asia-Pacific, that’s 40 days or more.
So who’s actually doing something about it? Right now, Africa is still more vulnerable than it is powerful in this space. But there is real money starting to move. Energy ministers from Africa’s biggest producers are meeting European buyers in Paris next month to lock in deals. Nigeria alone already supplies over half of Portugal’s total LNG imports. Senegal started producing in 2025. Congo is targeting 3 million tonnes of annual export capacity. After this week, the Europeans sitting across that table in Paris will be a great deal more motivated than they were when the meeting was scheduled. Ndlovu explained it to me further:
“What that has done is engage or inject rather a degree of impetus in African oil and gas projects that we haven’t seen before and so we are seeing projects being expedited like Namibia as mentioned, Senegal for instance that has been expedited, Mozambique as well. We see movements in markets as risky as Libya as well, we know that the Italians are heavily involved in Libya. We are also seeing movements around Tanzania, which has been frozen for quite a while now. And we’re seeing movements in other West African markets.”
The one to watch: Mozambique
Talking through African resource capacity with Ndlovu, it kept coming back to Mozambique. The Rovuma Basin is sitting on an estimated 180 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves. Major energy companies, like TotalEnergies and ENI, are already committed. The momentum has been building for years despite serious setbacks. And something he said now reads very differently after the Qatar strikes.
“Mozambique is gaining significant momentum not just through TotalEnergies but also through ENI with the offshore gas projects. Perhaps if there’s any country that can potentially serve as a short-term route, it is Mozambique, due to the floating liquefied natural gas facility. That is the only one I believe that can actually serve as some kind of repository.”
A floating LNG facility. In a world where Qatar’s Ras Laffan, the world’s biggest fixed LNG export complex, just took missile strikes and suspended production, that distinction suddenly matters enormously. Mozambique’s offshore floating infrastructure is harder to target, faster to reposition, and represents the kind of supply resilience that no Gulf facility can currently offer. The world just got a very loud demonstration of what happens when you concentrate that much gas infrastructure in one place.
The Rwanda complication and what it’s really about
But Mozambique’s story comes with a complication that I covered in last week’s entry and it’s worth connecting the dots here, because the energy angle changes how you read it entirely.
If you missed it: earlier this month, the US imposed sanctions on Rwanda. I covered the full breakdown in my last entry.
The background you need: Cabo Delgado, the province where Mozambique’s Rovuma Basin sits, was gripped for years by an insurgency that made the region effectively uninvestable. Rwanda deployed troops and stabilised the security situation. TotalEnergies, which had suspended operations after a particularly brutal attack on the town of Palma in 2021, returned. The projects restarted. That part of the story is real. But what’s happening now is something different. Rwanda is threatening to withdraw from Mozambique, not out of some principled stand, but as direct leverage in response to the US sanctions imposed on Kigali earlier this month. Kagame is using Rwanda’s presence in Cabo Delgado as a bargaining chip, specifically to pressure the EU into helping circumvent those American sanctions. It’s a calculated move: signal that you’ll walk away from the security arrangement, watch European energy ministers panic, and use that panic to extract concessions. Rwanda is essentially daring the EU to choose between its transatlantic relationships and its gas supply.
“Rwanda is basically playing a game of chicken. They’re essentially saying, you can try us and see how far you go with securing these assets, because we know that you know that we are crucial to the security.”
It’s a sophisticated play. And with the Gulf in flames and Mozambique’s floating LNG facility now looking like one of the few credible near-term alternatives for Europe, it’s a play that just got a lot more leverage behind it. But let’s be clear about what it is: Rwanda using African energy infrastructure as a geopolitical escape hatch from American sanctions pressure. The stability in Cabo Delgado is real. The motivation for threatening to undo it is entirely self-interested.
So why can’t Africa just step up right now?
Because even talking to Ndlovu, someone who knows this sector better than most, the answer was the same: yes, but not yet. And that gap, between yes and not yet just became one of the most consequential gaps in the global economy.
The gap between what’s in the ground and what can actually be delivered is enormous. No amount of reserves fixes a bottleneck problem, and right now the bottlenecks are everywhere, from logistics, pipelines, to refining capacity. Only Nigeria has a refinery large enough to service international markets. The continent currently exports raw and unprocessed gas rather than refined products, which means slower delivery and less value captured from its own resources.
“ And that once again has injected renewed impetus as Africans and other stakeholders to look at our logistical facilities, to look at our oil and gas infrastructure in order to position us appropriately, to take advantage of some of the openings that are happening in the oil and gas markets. So it’s great on paper but we’ve got very serious practical realities to deal with this. The other reality of it is actually refining the products here as opposed to importing raw crude or unprocessed gas. So, we can serve as an emergency rescue for Europe and global markets because we have the endowment but that is in the long term. Because in the short term we don’t have adequate capacity to extract and to transport those minerals that are needed. So, the net result is we end up suffering in the short term but if we do the right things, we’ll benefit in the long term.”
When I started writing this entry, the question was whether Africa could eventually be Europe’s gas backstop. By the time I’m filing it, Iran’s largest gas field has been bombed, Qatar’s biggest LNG facility has been struck, Brent crude oil is above $107, and Europe’s gas benchmark jumped 6% in a single session.
The geography works. The reserves are real. West Africa’s proximity to European terminals is a structural advantage no other supplier can match right now. The Paris meetings are happening. The deals are starting to move. And every missile that hits a Gulf gas facility makes the case for African energy more urgent than any amount of diplomatic advocacy ever could.
As always, my honest answer is that infrastructure still takes years to build. Refineries don’t appear overnight. And as the Rwanda situation shows, Africa’s energy potential is already being pulled into geopolitical games that have nothing to do with actually getting gas to the people who need it. Africa has the resources and the geography to shift global energy markets. But to truly seize this moment, we need infrastructure and political urgency.
Until next time.
