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The global energy transition is having profound impacts on natural resource producers, from the oil majors who are morphing into energy providers, to mining companies whose priorities are shifting as electric vehicles (EVs), battery storage and other new technologies take hold, and African governments and non-state actors who might profit from these changes but could also find themselves embroiled in new resource wars.

After three years of slow growth in adding generation infrastructure to the continent’s grids, capacity additions reached new lows in Q2 2021, with only 751MW of net on-grid capacity added – the lowest figure since at least 2013, according to African Energy Live Data. This was in part due to Covid-19, but other factors are at play too which suggest recovery will not be immediate

President Félix Tshisekedi’s efforts to revive Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)’s attraction to international oil companies (IOCs) are admirable on paper, as are his efforts to revive – and bring improved governance to – the crucial energy and mining sectors. Having broken with his alliance of convenience with ex-president Joseph Kabila, Tshisekedi’s government is looking for takers for blocks 1 and 2 in the Albertine Graben, and there is talk of a new licensing round, with plans to tender for 16 oil and three gas blocks in the onshore Atlantic basin, Cuvette Centrale and the western Rift Valley.

Despite fierce resistance from many resource-rich, infrastructure-poor African governments, 34 countries and five development banks committed to ending external funding for fossil fuel projects at the Cop26 summit. Dan Marks and African Energy staff ask whether the writing really is on the wall for natural gas projects

The British government, which remains COP president until November 2022 when Egypt takes over, is expected to take a more than usually active approach to climate change diplomacy over the next 12 months. One reason for this is that the United Kingdom has had an unusually long time to focus on the issue and it has an incentive to keep doing so.

The $8.5bn framework agreement signed during COP26 to support South Africa in reducing its greenhouse gas emissions – one of the conference’s headline achievements (AE 449/1) – is unlikely to include funding for gas projects, African Energy has been told. The terms of the deal will be heavily influenced by the commitment of a powerful group of countries to immediately halt fossil fuel-related financing. The agreement – which G7 governments intend to use as a model for deals with other countries – is highly dependent on concessional funding, the provision of which is in question.

COP26 opened with high-minded speeches and a welter of public and private sector commitments, as dozens of African nations said they would accelerate their own decarbonisation. Governments called for existing pledges to tackle environmental disaster to be met, underpinning a ‘just transition’ in which poorer economies aren’t penalised by big emitters’ plans to cut carbon.

Speeches made by African leaders at the 1-2 November opening of COP26 provided some insights into how they plan to move ahead with decarbonisation, while ensuring they don’t lose out on development opportunities for their economies. African Energy examines an A-to-Z of the leaders’ preoccupations

Many African countries see themselves as green sinks, with substantial forest cover which absorbs carbon from the atmosphere, but for which they receive no compensation. The issue – along with a pact to reduce methane emissions – featured prominently on 2 November, when the leaders of more than 100 countries committed to end deforestation by 2030;

African delegations are meeting in a massive and not yet fully prepared conference venue several days before COP26 officially opens, writes John Hamilton in Glasgow. The pre-sessional meeting of the African Group of Negotiators (AGN) is attempting once again to get the continent’s priority issues onto the global agenda, a few days before G20 leaders gather in Rome for what, in part, will be a pre-COP 26 assembly of developed nations and leading emerging markets.

Legal proceedings are due to be launched to challenge fundamental aspects of South Africa’s electricity policy, as the stakes in the battle between the government and environmentalists escalate, writes Dan Marks

The risk that almost 11GW of planned sub-Saharan power generation capacity will be shelved if Beijing carries through on one of its more public climate change pledges, to end state financing of overseas coal projects, underlines the extent Chinese policy impacts on African economies. In the run-up to a COP26 meeting, where superpower posturing may overwhelm efforts to achieve global consensus, Chinese policy on foreign projects, military expansion and huge debts are examined by Marc Howard, Ajay Ubhi and Jon Marks

Controversy continues to dog financing from China, the world’s largest bilateral lender by a distance. Its debt provision has transformed the African funding landscape over the past two decades: according to African Energy Live Data, $38bn of Chinese investment was committed to power projects across the continent between 2014 and 2019 alone.

Almost 11GW of planned generation capacity, with an estimated value of $9bn, is in jeopardy if China carries through with President Xi Jinping’s pledge to end state financing of overseas coal projects, according to calculations based on the African Energy Live Data platform.

Much of the news flow ahead of the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow in November has been about which global leaders will turn up and what carbon reduction commitments they will make. Many in Africa are more concerned the least-developed continent will be forced to adopt ill-fitting policy straightjackets and forced to choose between rival superpower-led development models, most notably China’s One Belt, One Road Initiative (BRI) and the US-led Clean Green Initiative (CGI) and Build Back Better for the World (B3W) programmes.