SUDAN'S GAS RESOURCES AND THE STRATEGIC COMPETITION FOR THE RED SEA

Summary

Sudan holds an estimated 3 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of natural gas reserves and a largely unexplored 57,000 km² offshore margin on the western Red Sea, but the country neither produces nor consumes gas in meaningful volumes today. This note assesses whether that resource position combined with Sudan's Red Sea coastline, its ports at Port Sudan and Suakin, and its location at the intersection of Egyptian, Saudi, Gulf and Horn of Africa strategic interests can translate into genuine geopolitical leverage, or whether it instead becomes another arena in which external powers compete for influence over a weak and internally fractured state.
The central finding is that Sudan's gas potential is currently a geological and locational fact, not a strategic asset. No commercial gas production exists; the sole confirmed discoveries (Suakin-1, Bashayer-1) date to the 1970s and were never appraised; and three years of civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have devastated the institutional, financial and technical capacity needed to convert acreage into production. China's National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), Sudan's most experienced hydrocarbons partner for three decades, formally withdrew from its last operating block in late 2025, invoking force majeure a strong signal that even patient, state-backed capital now judges the risk-adjusted return on Sudanese hydrocarbons to be negative.
What is strategically live is not the gas itself but the Red Sea coastline and Port Sudan, which have become objects of intense competition among Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey and Russia a competition that runs largely independent of, and well ahead of, any gas development. Russia has secured a naval-base agreement at Port Sudan (February 2025); Turkey is developing a naval-dock project at Suakin; the UAE's earlier port and free-zone ambitions at Abu Amama collapsed in November 2024 amid accusations of RSF backing; and Saudi Arabia has moved from mediation toward deeper institutionalization of its relationship with the SAF-led government, culminating in an August 2026 Saudi-Sudanese Coordination Council and a Saudi-led Red Sea security coalition that Sudan has joined. Gas licenses, port concessions and electricity interconnection (Egypt-Sudan, and the newly operational 3,000 MW Egypt-Saudi HVDC link) are all becoming instruments through which these external actors seek durable footholds, regardless of whether Sudanese gas itself is ever monetized.
The report's judgement is that, absent a durable political settlement, Sudan is best characterized as a strategically vulnerable state whose gas resources primarily provide an additional channel through which external competition is conducted, rather than a strategic asset that Sudan itself can leverage. A change in this trajectory would require, at minimum, an end to active conflict, a unified national authority able to sign and enforce contracts, and a competitive licensing process that diversifies foreign participation rather than concentrating it in the hands of whichever external patron currently backs the dominant faction in Port Sudan.