African production of natural gas poses a vexing climate challenge

As a young geologist working for Senegal’s state-owned petroleum company in the 1990s, Macky Sall was charged with prospecting for oil and gas in this West African nation. For years, he and his colleagues came up empty.

But more than two decades later, after Sall was elected to be Senegal’s president, an American energy company found a gas deposit so big that he has called it a “game changer.” The 15 trillion cubic feet of gas found in 2015 has turned Senegal into one of Africa’s biggest potential producers of natural gas — and turned Sall into a global champion for the right of developing nations to use their resources, including fossil fuels, to industrialize and develop.

After multiple delays, Senegal is now set to start producing gas from the reserves later this year, according to oil and gas giant BP, which is leading the operation.

The World Bank estimates that Africa was home to 40 percent of natural gas discoveries between 2010 and 2020, including one off Senegal’s coast near Saint Louis and another smaller deposit closer to the capital, Dakar. And in 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, European leaders, who had previously pledged to move away from fossil fuels, started looking toward Africa’s natural gas to replace flows from Russia.

Environmentalists have warned, however, that such efforts by developing nations could become among the most important drivers of climate change and thwart global attempts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. Environmental researchers generally agree that natural gas is preferable to oil and coal, but they also say it is still a fossil fuel that contributes too much to the planet’s warming at a moment when the United Nations has warned that drastic measures are needed to limit climate change.

Developing countries, like Senegal, often look to the World Bank and other global financial institutions for help with such ambitious development. So these natural gas projects will pose a test of the international pledges made at climate conferences to phase out fossil fuels.

More From The Washington Post (subscription required):