South Africa has talked about importing natural gas to help keep the lights on for years. According to Standard Bank’s gas-sector lead, Paul Eardley-Taylor, the whole plan now comes down to one government decision that is already overdue: naming the companies that get to build the country’s first big gas-fired power plants.
Eardley-Taylor calls that pending choice the sector’s “tipping point.” Pick the preferred bidders, he argues, and billions in investment can start to move; keep stalling, and “the whole thing falls over.”
The programme, and the hold-up
At the centre of it is the Gas Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme, the government’s first bid window for 2,000 megawatts of new gas-fired electricity. The request for proposals went out in December 2023, and after the energy department reworked parts of the process the deadline was pushed to late May 2026. Four bids came in, together offering about 2,800 megawatts — comfortably more than the 2,000-megawatt target. Yet the government’s power-buying office, the IPP Office, has still not named any winners.
Eardley-Taylor estimates the first wave of gas plants, import terminals and pipelines could need about $7.5 billion of investment. Much of it would be anchored by a planned import terminal at Richards Bay — a joint venture between Vopak, Reatile Group and Transnet Pipelines — that would ship in liquefied natural gas, the super-cooled gas moved by tanker, and turn it back into usable fuel for power stations and industry.
Why the clock matters
The urgency is that the old gas is running out. Supplies piped from Mozambique’s ageing Pande and Temane fields are depleting, and Sasol is expected to stop selling gas to other companies by 2030, leaving a gap the country has no ready answer for. A June agreement between the Richards Bay terminal, power utility Eskom and oil major ExxonMobil was an early step, and Eardley-Taylor says local banks have already backed the bids, so the money is there. His worry is execution: “South Africa is bad at first-of-a-kind projects,” he said.
He also pushes back on the idea that imported gas is simply too expensive. It should be judged not against the cheap pipeline gas South Africa used to get from Mozambique, he says, but against the diesel and heavy fuel oil the country would otherwise burn — on which measure, he reckons, the country is “simply catching up with the rest of the world.”
