The Industrial Gas Users Association-Southern Africa (IGUA-SA) has outlined the policy requirements it believes are now required to mitigate what would otherwise be a steep decline in gas supply to domestic industry by 2030.

Described as a ‘gas cliff’ the fall-off is anticipated when existing supply from Mozambique’s Pande-Temane fields is no longer available to industrial consumers from 2028 and after Sasol ends its temporary two-year supply of methane-rich gas, produced using coal.

In an update to its ‘Gas Roadmap for South Africa’, published in November and which called for greater coordinated action to avert the supply shortfall, IGUA-SA has added ten policy actions, including:

• Designating gas supply, liquefied natural gas terminals, pipelines, storage and gas-to-power infrastructure as strategic national economic infrastructure;
• Establishing a statutory task team in The Presidency with a public–private mandate to execute emergency mitigation and long-term strategy;
• Adopting a formal demand stack that consolidates industrial and power demand into sequenced anchor loads;
• Designating priority corridors and nodes to align gas infrastructure with demand and enable access to gas for regional industrialisation;
• Adopting a fiscal support model, including guarantees and viability gap funding, to enable investment decisions;
• Recognising qualified gas aggregators as approved contracting vehicles to create scale and improve supplier negotiation leverage;
• Adopting a bilateral integration strategy with Mozambique and Namibia to diversify supply and strengthen regional integration;
• Aligning the country’s electricity, energy and gas plans with an infrastructure roadmap to improve regulatory certainty and investor confidence;
• Recognising gas as a complement to renewables and enabler of coal repowering and industrial growth; and
• Establishing a specialist energy infrastructure tribunal or technical court division to reduce litigation risk and accelerate infrastructure certainty.

The document argues that South Africa stands at a defining moment in its energy transition and that immediate political alignment and decisive action on gas are essential to stabilise the economy, safeguard industry, and enable a managed transition to a sustainable energy mix.