Billions At Play

A comprehensive but entertaining look at Africa's oil & gas present and future.
Two decades of negotiating African oil and gas deals have given NJ Ayuk a grasp of the continent's energy landscape that few can match. The American-educated, African energy lawyer serves up generous doses of that insight in his second book, 'Billions at Play: The Future of Africa Energy and Doing Deals.' He offers a road map for the continent doing a better job of using its vast energy resources to improve its peoples' lives.

He addresses how African countries can use their energy industries as spring boards for diversifying and growing their overall economies. Another is how they can negotiate better deals with international energy companies and how the continent's countries can use marginal oil and gas fields to develop domestic energy industries that, once strong, will compete globally. In addition, Ayuk discusses why Africa's fledgling natural gas industry can become an international powerhouse, how the continent can improve its notoriously unreliable, economy-sapping power industry, why American energy companies should stop curtailing their investments in Africa, and why the continent's energy industry needs more women.

The book's underlying theme is that -- in Ayuk's words -- 'too often, our natural resources create wealth for foreign investors and a select group of African elites while everyday people fail to benefit.' As for Africans needing to step up their energy-negotiations game, Ayuk notes that when he became an oil and gas lawyer years ago, 'Africans were not part of any kind of deal-making structure: When negotiations involving foreign investors' oil and gas exploration, production, and revenue-sharing took place, Africans were not at the table--or even in the room.'