In April 2025, British Petroleum (BP) announced that the first shipment of cargo from the Grande Tortue Ahmeyim Liquified Natural Gas project was exported from its offshore carrier facility. Straddling the maritime border between Senegal and Mauritania, the project is jointly owned by BP and Kosmos, with the Senegalese and Mauritanian states holding minority shares. The project’s first LNG export recuperated some reputational damage suffered by the project earlier in the year, following a gas leak in February 2025. The leak had been ongoing for several weeks, and while the Mauritanian government claimed the impact was likely to be negligible, it drew criticism from Greenpeace for its potential impact upon the marine ecosystem off the Mauritanian and Senegalese coast, as well as from artisanal fishing community groups in Saint Louis, Senegal. With the first shipment of the project announced in a press conference in April, media attention has largely shifted from the fallout from the leak, and toward the projected annual export of 2.5 million tonnes of LNG once fully operational.

This prospect holds great promise for European powers in search of alternative energy sources following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, particularly as Mauritania remains a potential source of economic cooperation in a region increasingly defined by inter-imperial rivalry, primarily between Western actors and Russia. Having upended the regional order through ejecting Western military and diplomatic partners and withdrawing from ECOWAS, the three states of the self-styled Alliance of Sahelian States (AES), Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, have since targeted Western economic interests. Mali has become embroiled in a dispute with Canadian mining firm Barrick Gold over what the Malian government claims are tax errors. In November 2024, the government arrested several Barrick Gold employees and closed its Bamako office, and it has since moved to seize control of the mining operation. Similarly in Niger, the local director of French uranium firm Orano was arrested following raids on their offices in the north of the country this year. This followed the Nigerian military government’s announcement that it had taken over operational control of Orano’s local mining firm in December 2024, and the opening of international arbitration proceedings against the country by Orano. In Burkina Faso, too, a new state mining company has been created, which has taken control of two industrial gold mines previously owned by a London-listed mining company.

While in recent memory, Mauritania belonged to the same regional security alliance as the now AES states—in the form of the Western-backed G5 Sahel security alliance—it has thus far not followed the lead of its former security partners in their outright rejection of Western influence. The reasons for this are partly historical; in the 1970s, Mauritania nationalized its mining industry and withdrew from that economic relic of the French colonial era, the West African CFA currency system. From its perspective, then, the struggles currently being waged elsewhere in the region against French neocolonialism appear, in a sense, obsolete. More recently, Mauritania has studiously avoided running headlong into the type of military adventures which ultimately cost other governments dearly in the Sahel region. In the decade preceding the spate of military coups that occurred in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso from 2020 to 2023, all three states were close partners of Operation Barkhane, the French counterinsurgency campaign whose failure to stem extremist violence deepened the unpopularity of heads of state in each country. While Mauritania has refused any deployment of French troops on its territory, it has retained close military ties with Western partners, embracing NATO military training and security cooperation initiatives. NATO, in turn, increasingly views Mauritania as a vital strategic partner within its so-called ‘Southern Flank’.