CAPE TOWN, October 15, 2026 — 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], has said.
Ghezali made the remarks during a technical panel at the GECF-AEC Strategic Forum held as part of African Energy Week [AEW] 2026 in Cape Town.
The bank, established by APPO and Afreximbank, will adopt a corridor approach, prioritising projects that promote regional economic development across four areas: export infrastructure, domestic infrastructure, clean cooking and power.
Ghezali said exports and domestic supply should not be viewed as competing priorities.
“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. The two organisations also plan to harmonise transit tariffs and gas contracts across member states.
The panel examined why domestic gas markets remain underdeveloped across Africa.
Rashid Ali Abdallah, Executive Director of the African Energy Commission [AFREC], said recent investment had largely focused on export terminals, while regional pipelines continued to struggle to attract financing.
He called for regional financing frameworks to support cross-border infrastructure, as well as joint planning for gas pipelines and power transmission networks.
In South Africa, industrial consumers could lose access to natural gas supplies within about 18 months, with only a short-term coal supply bridge available beyond that period, said Jaco Human, Executive Officer of the Industrial Gas Users Association of Southern Africa [IGUA-SA].
He said the gas aggregation company was established to pool demand, share risk and support the development of new infrastructure across the region.
Human said a proposed pipeline linking the Orange Basin to markets in the Western Cape and inland South Africa would require annual demand of about 200 petajoules.
“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 would require at least $1 trillion over the next 30 years to develop its gas resources.
He said per capita energy consumption on the continent was about 25 gigajoules a year, well below the global average.
Abderrezak Benyoucef, Head of Energy Studies at Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries [OPEC], said the organisation expects gas to account for 23 percent of Africa’s energy mix by 2050, up from 17 percent currently.
Electricity generation is projected to increase from less than 1,000 TWh to about 2,700 TWh, with gas expected to account for half of the generation.
The AEB is headquartered in Abuja, where Nigeria handed over the bank’s offices to APPO and Afreximbank in February.
https://thecooperator.news/appo-sg-ghezali-to-address-aew-2026-as-african-energy-bank-nears-launch/
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