Representatives meeting in Dubai this week indicated that some African countries plan to utilise their oil and gas reserves to combat poverty and energy shortages, despite efforts to limit fossil fuel exploitation to combat global warming.
Officials and business executives emphasised that Africa as a whole has a limited carbon footprint, accounting for 3.7 percent of global CO2 emissions in 2020, according to Statista.
"We want to develop our resources as Africa, just as our brothers in the West have done," John Munyes, Kenya's minister of petroleum and mining, told the Africa Oil Week conference in Dubai, which coincided with the second week of the United Nations COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.
"Much of Kenya is renewables, we just want to tap into what God has given us: hydrocarbons," he added.
Both existing and rising producers are attempting to speed up hydrocarbon extraction across the African continent, where 600 million people do not have access to power.
"We understand that we have to mitigate the damage to the planet. That's why we have signed up to the energy transition," Thomas Camara, Ivory Coast's minister of mines, petroleum and energy, said.
"But for our African nations, we have to ensure that our populations have access to energy … We will not turn our back to oil and energy companies so we can ensure the happiness - and even the existence - of our populations."
During the event in Dubai, a total of two dozen African countries marketed their energy sectors to investors.
Angola, an OPEC member whose output peaked in 2008 and has been slowly dropping for the previous half-decade, intends to develop new fields, notably through licencing rounds for onshore and offshore blocks in 2023 and 2025, respectively.
Output in 2031 is projected to slightly exceed last year's roughly 1.3 million barrels a day.
Ghana, which discovered oil in 2007 and began extracting it at the end of 2010, plans to invest in oil and gas development first, then use the proceeds to invest in infrastructure and social welfare, such as healthcare and education, according to Andrew Egyapa Mercer, the country's deputy energy minister.
"We believe strongly in oil and gas, and in particular gas" to ensure reliable energy baseloads, he added.