CITAC's latest Annual Review of the African downstream sector paints a dramatic picture of the future of the continent's energy demand in coming years. And it sounds a warning about the rising risk of the local African refineries failing to meet that demand in the face of rising competition from new Asian refineries in a world already suffering from global overcapacity.

CITAC's "2010 Annual Review" provides precise demand, import, export and refinery output data for Sub-Saharan Africa. From this base CITAC presents convincing forecasts which show demand for oil products rising by a massive 60% over the next decade, from 1.54 mn b/d in 2009 to 2.52 mn b/d in 2020.

Accurate data on Africa's frequently opaque oil industry is hard to come by, leading most analysts to plug approximations into their models. CITAC's 2009 data, however, breaks out the continent at the country and regional level. It forecasts annual growth of 4.9% for West and Central Africa and 4.4% for East and Southern Africa. For Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, the growth rate comes out at 4.6% per year – compared with an overall global growth rate of around 1% per year.

In common with much of the world's refining industry, Sub-Saharan Africa had a difficult year in 2009, CITAC says. A combination of financial and technical problems caused the region's refinery production to fall to an average of 801,000 b/d in 2009, down from 962,000 b/d in 2008. Sub-Saharan Africa's refineries have a combined nameplate capacity of 1.45mn b/d.

But if 2009 was a tough year, things are only likely to get tougher, CITAC says.

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