President Samia Suluhu Hassan has renewed efforts to get Tanzania a spot on the prestigious Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) exporters club after oil investors companies stalled in 2019.

Tanzania has an estimated 57 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves, with a total annual production of 110 billion cubic feet from three fields, but disagreements with oil corporations over production sharing have kept them untapped.

With renewed efforts by President Samia, the East African country could unlock as much as $30 billion in foreign investment while also escaping the energy transition, or the rush to decarbonize that could render its enormous gas reserves useless.

Meanwhile, Egypt has announced that construction of a new gas pipeline in its western desert has begun. The facility is expected to pump 15 million cubic feet of gas per day.

Last year, the north African country witnessed eight discoveries of natural gas, two in the Mediterranean and six in the western desert, adding an estimated 600 billion cubic feet of new reserves.

These developments might be crucial in the long run, as the authorities decided on hiking fuel prices for the third time this year. According to EFG Hermes, higher fuel prices will not have a large impact on headline inflation, given a 2.4% average increase in prices and a continued stabilisation of diesel prices.