Mele Kyari, NNPC CEO
The Group Managing Director of Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC), Mele Kyari, has said a huge investment decision on the $25 billion gas pipeline from Nigeria to Morocco will likely be taken in 2023, per a Bloomberg report.
The 5,600-kilometer (3,840-mile) pipeline is expected to supply gas to 11 countries along the African coast on its way to Morocco, before connecting to Spain or Italy where it will help feed the European gas market.
Recall that the NNPC Ltd and Morocco’s National Office of Hydrocarbons and Mines signed a memorandum of understanding last month that inched the long-gestating project closer to reality. The project is one of two such initiatives the NNPC Ltd is promoting in an effort to capitalize on European demand for new sources of gas after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is also a signatory to the MOU.
“We will make a final investment decision next year,” Bloomberg quoted Kyari as saying in an interview in Abuja. Discussions around financing are ongoing, he said, without disclosing the institutions interested in backing the project.
The project is expected to cost between $20 billion and $25 billion and will be constructed in phases, according to Kyari. The first segment would take three years to finish and the others five years, Kyari said. Following a previous agreement in 2018, the Moroccan state agency MAP said the pipeline could take as long as 25 years to complete. Nigeria’s gas exports are currently limited to shipments from Nigeria LNG Ltd., a joint venture between NNPC and international energy companies including Shell Plc and Eni SpA.
Nigeria has Africa’s largest proven gas reserves at about 200 trillion cubic feet, most of which is untapped, flared or re-injected into oil wells. The federal government says it wants to monetize much more of the gas, for domestic use and export, to replace crude as the country’s key commodity. Quadrupling gas production in the next four years is “very realizable,” according to Kyari.
The NNPC has also revived a long-abandoned proposal for a separate transcontinental gas pipeline that would travel about 4,400 kilometres through the Sahara Desert to Algeria for onward transport to Europe.
“We have seen the opportunity to bring back every gas pipeline project that you can think of,” Kyari said. “It is a matter of who needs it and who’s ready to pay for it.”
“Of more immediate concern to the country is its oil output, which has been declining steadily since 2020 and hit a multi-decade low of less than 1.2 million barrels per day in August, which the government says stem from large-scale crude oil theft and vandalism of pipelines in the Niger Delta.
“A few days back, security forces uncovered an illegal pipeline connected to an onshore facility that had transported stolen crude oil 4 kilometres out to sea “undetected” for nine years,” Kyari said.
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Nigeria-Morocco gas line: $25bn investment decision to be taken next year ― Kyari
Nigeria-Morocco gas line: $25bn investment decision to be taken next year ― Kyari
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