When Jimoh Abeeb first heard about using compressed natural gas (CNG) to run cars back in 2022, he didn’t think much of the idea. A friend had just adapted his vehicle for CNG and was encouraging him to do the same.
“When he told me that I was going to use up to N450,000 ($282) to convert my car to CNG, I just lost interest,” Abeeb told Climate Home.
But the following year, the Nigerian government removed its fuel subsidy, causing petrol prices to rocket from about N250 ($0.16) a litre in March 2023 to N1,180 ($0.74) in October 2024.
The Abuja-based civil engineer quit his job at the start of 2024 to go freelance but towards the end of the year, he was struggling to afford his usual petrol bill of about N250,000 ($157) a month as he crisscrossed the city to work on different construction sites. “I was using 50 percent of my monthly earnings just to fuel my car,” Abeeb said.
So in October, he spent N800,000 ($502) to convert his vehicle to run on CNG. For just N3000 ($1.88), he can now fill his cylinder which lasts for three days and covers 150-200 kilometres. “It is a game changer,” Abeeb said.
Across Africa, growing numbers of drivers are doing the same. This is evident in the long queues of people waiting in line to refill their CNG cylinders in countries such as Tanzania and Nigeria, as the supply network struggles to keep pace with surging demand.
Leap in CNG use
Mordor Intelligence estimates that the African market for vehicles powered by CNG and LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) is expected to grow 7% a year between 2025 and 2030, with most of the growth in CNG.
Some African governments are supporting this expansion. Nigeria, for example, has launched a Presidential CNG Initiative (Pi-CNG) to “provide succor to the masses” due to the hardship caused by the fuel subsidy removal and to deliver a “cleaner alternative” to petrol and diesel.
In some states, it provides free conversion for commercial drivers and a 50-percent discount for ride-share vehicles. Last July, the country’s state-owned oil company commissioned a dozen CNG stations in major cities, while constructing 35 more across the country.
Over in East Africa, the Tanzanian government has also invested in CNG stations and is partnering with private companies to fast-track infrastructure development. Additional support includes certifying retrofitting workshops and eliminating duties on CNG equipment and conversion kits to make adoption more affordable for businesses and individuals.
Vehicles queue at a CNG filling station in Abuja, Nigeria
Also, in late 2024, the Egyptian government announced the roll-out of a national initiative to convert 1.5 million vehicles to CNG this year. Prime Minister Moustafa Madbouly said it would reduce carbon emissions and cut fuel costs for citizens.
The environmental benefits of this African shift to gas for transport are, however, hotly contested. CNG is a fossil fuel – natural gas – where the gas has been compressed so that it can be stored in high-pressure cylinders for use in vehicles. Critics say that its deployment will detract from efforts to run vehicles on clean electricity.
But CNG does produce less exhaust and greenhouse gas emissions than motors running on gasoline or diesel oil.
These qualities make it a viable energy transition fuel for Africa, said Michael David Terungwa, climate advocate at the Global Initiative for Food Security and Ecosystem Preservation (GIFSEP). As well as being “cleaner” than petrol, it is also more affordable, given price increases and poverty levels on the continent, he added.
Still a fossil fuel
But Lorraine Chiponda, Africa coordinator at the Global Gas & Oil Network, argued that adopting CNG for vehicles will lock Africa into using climate-polluting fuel for transport. She said the conversion is “misguided”, adding that fossil fuel firms are trying to “greenwash people into believing that gas is cleaner”.
With governments setting net zero targets – like Nigeria’s for 2060 – they must eventually phase out fossil fuels, she argued, thereby making Africa’s CNG adoption “both short term and short-sighted”. “Seeing African countries adopting technologies that will soon be redundant is not the transition that we are aiming for,” she added.
Africa should instead be negotiating green technology transfer – for the production of batteries, chargers and electric vehicles (EVs) – with richer nations including China, as well as mobilising public and private investment, Chiponda said.
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Interest in EVs is increasing across Africa and countries are preparing to electrify transport, albeit at a slow pace. A report by the global think-tank Energy for Growth Hub found that many African countries are lagging, with only a quarter of those analysed – like Morocco and South Africa – demonstrating high readiness for EV adoption.
But even in those places that are most advanced, the challenges of weak electric grid infrastructure, limited access to finance and low incomes limit EV potential, the report says.
A CNG retrofitting workshop in Port Harcourt, Nigeria (Photo: Vivian Chime)
In Nigeria, “if you have an electric car, where are you going to charge it?” Terungwa asked. “Also if you look at the average cost of an electric vehicle, we cannot afford it,” he said, adding that until these issues are addressed, CNG offers more economic benefits.
What African countries need to transition to electric transport systems is huge investment in EV manufacturing rather than importing goods and equipment, he noted. “Global North companies should set up factories for the production of batteries and the manufacturing or assembling of EVs – that way, it will become cheaper,” he added.
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Energy and industry consultant Elizabeth Obode said drivers are interested in CNG because it is cheaper rather than “cleaner”. The high cost of EVs, coupled with a lack of good roads, charging stations and repair workshops, “is the huge killer” for EV adoption, so that even if African countries wanted to shift entirely to EVs and ban CNG vehicles in the next decade, they would struggle to do it, she added.
Obode said that to encourage EV adoption, African governments need to incentivise the private sector to invest by offering tax breaks and other financial support for battery production, charging stations and EV manufacturing.
She and Terungwa agreed that countries should plan a time-frame to move away from CNG. Obode said governments can work with their net-zero emissions targets “to help determine what is realistic in terms of transitioning away from CNG use”.
(Reporting by Vivian Chime; editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)
The post African governments opt for gas-run cars over EVs to drive down transport emissions appeared first on Climate Home News.
African governments opt for gas-run cars over EVs to drive down transport emissions
The launch of the Africa Energy Bank (AEB) has been put back yet again, raising doubts about the institution’s future ability to finance fossil fuel projects – its main objective – as global lenders retreat from such investments over climate concerns, experts told Climate Home News.
The bank, which had been billed to launch in September after a series of delays, is now scheduled to begin operations in November, according to the head of the African Energy Chamber, an advocacy body for the continent’s oil and gas sector.
Even as the world aims to transition away from fossil fuels, many African leaders have made clear they want to continue exploring and extracting the continent’s large oil and gas deposits – estimated at around 125 billion barrels of crude and over 600 trillion cubic feet of gas – to boost economic development.
As a group, Africa sided with a number of powerful oil-and-gas producing nations in blocking progress on negotiations to craft a global roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels at last year’s UN COP30 climate talks, although some countries did individually support the proposal.
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Meanwhile, major projects under development across the continent – including the 1,443-km East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) and Dangote’s 700,000-barrel-per-day Kenyan refinery – show that African governments see oil and gas as playing a significant role in meeting their energy and economic needs for many years to come.
In 2022, at a gathering of the African Petroleum Producers’ Organization (APPO) in oil-rich Angola, ministers from its member states adopted a resolution to create the Africa Energy Bank to finance projects for the production, use and trade of oil, gas and broader energy sources.
African control over energy resources
An article on the APPO website explains that the bank was conceived as a way to overcome “disenchantment” with fossil fuels among “the international community” which it said had crystallised around the “energy transition” concept.
“If Western countries, after having long taken advantage of the energy sources they now revile to develop, can afford the luxury of abandoning them, this is not the case in Africa,” it adds, noting that many of the continent’s economies are still largely dependent on oil and gas revenues.
A separate web page about the bank, also hosted on APPO’s website, says its objectives include financing the exploration, production and refining of oil and gas, as well as supporting member states in transitioning from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources “while ensuring energy security”.
Said Addi, a former executive with Shell and energy commodities trading house Gunvor, said the new bank was judged necessary because financing for hydrocarbons from many traditional international lenders has become constrained.
In trying to fill this financing gap, Africa is not simply setting up another fund to support oil and gas, he added. “It is also an attempt to give African countries greater control over how their energy resources and infrastructure are financed,” he explained.
Nigeria to host the AEB
The energy bank – a joint initiative of APPO and the African Export–Import Bank (Afreximbank) – has so far suffered several delays and is almost two years behind schedule. The initial plan was to start operations in January 2025, with Nigeria as the host country, but the bank’s opening was delayed to June of that year to allow Nigeria time to finalise the construction of the bank’s headquarters in Abuja.
After the government announced the completion of the offices in late November 2025, a new launch date was set for January 2026, which was moved back to April, June and then September. Now it has shifted again to November, raising concerns that the institution may be losing momentum.
Former Shell executive Addi said that if the capital is eventually paid in, the bank becomes operational and its first projects are commercially credible, then the delays will be regarded as normal teething troubles in setting up a multilateral institution. But, he added, scepticism will be justified if it continues to stall.
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Baron Lamarré, an oil and gas expert and former Petronas oil trader, said that missing “three deadlines in a row is not normal”, and warned that if the timeline slips again, “the story flips from ‘ambitious institution finding its footing’ to ‘good idea that lost momentum before it found any’.”
The Nigerian government, APPO and Afreximbank did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.
The funding challenge
The Africa Energy Bank is targeting base capital of $5 billion, with plans to scale up to $120 billion within five years by mobilising private-sector funds. However, it is expected to start operations with initial seed capital of $500 million.
The funding plan is to have the 18 member countries of the APPO contribute $83 million each to the bank as equity for a combined $1.5 billion. Afreximbank, other non-APPO African countries and investors outside the continent are expected to provide the remaining $3.5 billion.
But even the initial $500 million has not been easy to mobilise. In May, APPO Secretary-General Farid Ghezali called on members to deliver on their pledges towards the startup goal before the end of June. But the delays suggest this may not have been met, with experts saying Africa may be finding it difficult to self-fund its oil and gas projects in the absence of international capital.
Lamarré said every extension of the deadline points to the fact that “raising fossil fuel capital in Africa without the majors and their financing networks is brutally hard”.
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Since 2020, Western lenders, export credit agencies and insurers have been in steady retreat from African hydrocarbons, he said, while oil majors are divesting their African assets, handing over fields to smaller local operators whose credit ratings are not high enough to borrow cheaply.
Even capital from China and the Gulf, which has partially filled the gap, cannot match the volume, tenor or pricing that Western investors once offered, Lamarré argued.
“If mobilising the first $500 million of seed capital [for the AEB] has taken this long, that’s the clearest signal yet of how steep the climb to $120 billion looks,” he said, noting that the continent’s energy financing gap is as large as $30 billion-$45 billion per year.
Africa’s investment landscape, meanwhile, has been shifting. While foreign direct investment dropped from a 2024 peak, inflows remained roughly one-third above the continent’s long-term average in 2025, according to the 2026 World Investment Report from UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD). They are concentrated in a few sectors including critical minerals needed for renewable energy technologies, battery manufacturing and advanced industrial production.
At the same time, data on global energy investment from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that fossil fuel investment in Africa has declined over the last decade.
“Trojan horse” for fossil fuels
While the Africa Energy Bank struggles to get off the ground, climate campaigners have criticised its primary aim of financing oil and gas on the continent at a time when the world is starting to move away from high-carbon fuels to cleaner alternatives.
Bhekumuzi Dean Bhebhe, founder of Africa Change Lab, described the bank as a “Trojan horse”, arguing that its focus on fossil fuel financing runs counter to the global energy transition and the African Union’s Agenda 2063 goals of sustainable development and inclusive growth.
The energy bank, he warned, “risks locking Africa into a new cycle of debt, dependency and fossil fuel entrenchment”, adding that its financing blueprint does not pave the way for a climate-resilient future. “In truth, it is to deepen the same extractive, carbon-heavy pathways that the continent should be moving away from,” he added.
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Kenya-based climate and energy expert Joab Okanda said the AEB’s plan to finance oil and gas is “a misplaced priority” and it should instead back clean energy in line with the policies of some of Africa’s major export markets like Europe.
In addition, the new bank could struggle to mobilise enough resources to advance large-scale oil and gas projects, he added, noting that its proposed $5-billion initial capital is equivalent to the cost of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline alone.
The AEB’s aim of backing more fossil fuels should be flipped “to support countries that are oil-dependent to start working on their transition plans”, Okanda said.
The post Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes appeared first on Climate Home News.
Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes
A booklet published by the UK’s opposition Conservative party includes a “cost of net-zero” that appears to have been doubled by a spreadsheet error.
The “common sense” policy document argues that “what people ultimately want is a government competent enough to solve the problems for which it takes responsibility”.
In a section that says “sophisticat[ed]…modelling” should not be a substitute for “political judgement”, the “Right Way” document disparages various estimates of the cost of net-zero.
The Conservative document then claims – incorrectly – that the government’s official adviser, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), had put the cost of net-zero at close to £1tn. It says:
“In 2020, the CCC estimated that its route to net-zero would cost £957bn.”
In fact, the CCC’s 2020 estimate was exactly half this amount – £478bn – and last year it published a revised figure of £108bn, largely as a result of the falling cost of electric vehicles (EVs).
Spreadsheet error
The Conservative party’s erroneous claim appears to stem from another report that had accidentally added up numbers twice, using a spreadsheet published by the CCC in 2020.
The 2020 spreadsheet contains a table listing the additional investments that would be needed to build a net-zero economy, from low-carbon electricity generation through to heat pumps and EVs.
These extra capital expenditures, listed as “CAPEX”, add up to a total of £1.38tn over the 30 years of 2020-50. They are set against operational savings, listed as “OPEX”, of £0.90tn.
Added up over 2020-50, the combined CAPEX and OPEX figures come to a total of £478bn.
In addition to the annual sectoral CAPEX and OPEX figures, the CCC’s 2020 spreadsheet also has a line giving combined totals for each year. It appears that someone has added all of these numbers together, resulting in the savings and costs being counted twice.
This double-counted total for the cost of net-zero amounts to £957bn – as shown in the image below – and it appears to be the source of the claim in the Conservative booklet.
At the time of publication in 2020, the CCC said that the £478bn net cost of net-zero amounted to less than 1% of GDP over 30 years – and that the large investment needed would not only result in savings due to lower fossil-fuel imports, but that it would boost GDP overall, by around 2%.
In 2025, the CCC revised its estimates for investment costs and operating savings to £670bn and £562bn respectively, giving a net total of £108bn over 2025-50, or less than 0.2% of GDP.
Earlier this year, the committee said that cutting emissions to net-zero would cost less than a single fossil-fuel price shock and that doing so would have benefits worth £110bn per year.
Paper trail
The erroneous claim in the Conservative document is referenced to the CCC’s 2020 advice on the UK’s sixth “carbon budget”, which, as explained, does not contain the £957bn figure.
The earliest online use of the £957bn figure found by Carbon Brief is a 12 January 2026 article in the Spectator, by retired engineer and self-described “accidental energy analyst” David Turver.
A day later, Turver repeated the mistaken number in a report for the free-market Institute of Economic Affairs. His report cites figure 5.3 of the CCC’s 2020 advice.
However, as set out above, the CCC spreadsheet containing the data for figure 5.3 only adds up to £478bn, half the figure claimed by Turver.
It appears that Turver accidentally added up all of the numbers in the CCC spreadsheet, without noting that it already included a line for the annual total. This results in double-counting the cost.
(Turver’s report also triggered a slew of inaccurate headlines stating that net-zero would cost £7.6tn – or even £9tn. These figures, which came from Turver’s report, were based, among other things, on the implicit assumption that fossil fuels and the cars, boilers and power plants that use them are all free.)
After Turver’s report and article in January 2026, the erroneous £957bn figure was repeated in March by the Great British Think Tank. The organisation has the tagline “data, not vibes” and says of its work: “Every figure [is] sourced from official public bodies.”
The £957bn figure then appeared in the Conservative “Right Way” document in October 2026.
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