Italy’s Eni plans to invest about €20-billion ($22.5-billion) in Africa over the next four years, mostly in oil and gas, the company’s CEO Claudio Descalzi said on Friday.
“That represents about 60% of our investments” (over that period) he said at the International Energy Agency in Paris.
Descalzi said Eni, which is involved in projects in 15 African countries, will also help boost and diversify the continent’s energy mix through investments in renewables.
“In the long-term we are going to invest much more to develop the giant gas fields that we have found,” he said.
Eni has made major gas discoveries especially in Mozambique and recently in Egypt that have increased its reserves, with more than 12-billion barrels of discoveries in the last seven years, mostly in Africa.
Africa’s energy mix has remained unchanged over the past ten years and is unsustainable, with biomass for cooking still the main source, Descalzi said.
Descalzi said Africa’s solar power potential was about 300 000 GW, wind about 7 000 GW, hydro about 283 GW and geothermal about 15 GW.
Eni has said it was ready to spend “hundreds of millions” of euros in developing solar power projects in Africa and that the company was focused on starting production at its giant offshore Zohr gas field in Egypt by end-2017, which will give Egypt 100% energy security.
