On the sidelines of the 2023 edition of the Energy Forum organized by the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) in Abuja, Mele Kyari, CEO of the company “Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited” (NNPC) announced that his company has decided to invest 12.5 billion dollars, in order to guarantee a 50% stake in the round of the mega project, reports the Nigerian daily The Nation. The Morocco-Nigeria Gas Pipeline project is expected to cost $25 billion.
To read: Where is the Morocco-Nigeria gas pipeline project?
In October 2022, Mele Kyari had, in a statement to Bloomberg, promised to make “a final investment decision next year” before adding that discussions around financing were ongoing. However, he did not mention the names of the structures that agreed to support the realization of the project.
Read: Morocco-Nigeria gas pipeline: Nigeria’s final decision expected in 2023
This large-scale project will be carried out in several phases and will follow the West African coast from Nigeria for 5,600 kilometers, passing through Benin, Togo, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Gambia, Senegal and Mauritania, as far as Morocco, and will be connected to the Maghreb-Europe Gas Pipeline and the European gas network. The pipeline will also benefit landlocked countries such as Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali. The project is already in the second phase of detailed design, and is currently undergoing an environmental impact assessment and right-of-way surveys.
To read: Morocco-Nigeria gas pipeline: “Europe sees in this project a way to diversify its supplies”
As a reminder, five tripartite Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) were signed on Monday, December 5, 2022 in Rabat, Morocco and Nigeria, on the one hand, and by Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Ghana, on the other hand, under the Nigeria-Morocco Gas Pipeline project. One of these MoUs was signed by ONHYM and NNPC with Gambia National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC-Gambia).