EIA - South Africa is one of the world’s leading emitters of energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2), ranking fifteenth globally in 2015 and accounting for more than any other country in Africa. In an effort to reduce CO2 emissions, South Africa is planning to diversify its energy portfolio, replacing coal with lower CO2-emitting fuels such as natural gas and renewable sources. The country’s Intended National Determined Contribution, submitted as part of the Paris Agreement, plans for CO2 emissions to peak by 2025, remain flat for a decade, and begin to decline around 2035.

BLOOMBERG - The region’s median government debt level will probably exceed 50 percent of gross domestic product this year from 34 percent in 2013, while the cost of servicing the liabilities will average almost 10 percent compared with half that four years ago, the International Monetary Fund said.

Nigeria, South Africa, and Angola, the continent’s largest economies, are seeing a rebound from the sharp slowdown in 2016, but the recovery has been slow due to insufficient adjustment to low commodity prices and policy uncertainty. Furthermore, several oil exporters in the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) are facing economic difficulties.

The scaled-up IDA financing will build on a portfolio of 448 ongoing projects in Africa totaling about $50 billion. Of this, a $1.6 billion financing package is being developed to tackle the impending threat of famine in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and other regions.

With hundreds of millions of people living without electricity in the world's poorest continent, African countries are increasingly turning to gas to take advantage of lower global LNG prices amid a supply glut.

The Ugandan and Tanzanian governments are trying to fast-track a $4 billion oil pipeline that would connect landlocked Uganda to foreign markets even though construction won’t start in August as they originally indicated.

“South Africa’s oil refineries are not ready and will not be ready to produce Euro 4 standard fuel, let alone Euro 6, which the world is moving to by 2017 or 2020 in preparation for the introduction of more fuel-efficient vehicles,” he said in an opinion piece in Johannesburg-based Business Report newspaper Tuesday. “Our present crude-oil stocks are suitable for producing products of lower specifications, which means we need to stockpile higher-quality grades of crude oil.”

“Capital markets are effectively closed to the oil and gas industry” in Africa, Tony Hayward, former head of BP Plc and now chairman of Genel Energy Plc, said at a conference in Cape Town last month. “A decade of exploration, with billions of dollars invested and only limited commercial success.”

The late start of the overseas expansion of Chinese oil companies means that their foreign oil assets are largely located in Africa rather than in main oil producing countries in the Middle East

Deepening political divisions between Nigeria’s regions over the presidential poll and the absence of a clear front-runner increase the risk of a contested outcome and a turbulent aftermath