Johnson Progress

After a decade of stop-start negotiations, West African leaders finally put pen to paper.

Meeting in Sierra Leone’s capital on Sunday, heads of state at the ECOWAS summit signed off on the Nigeria-Morocco Atlantic Gas Pipeline a project so vast it will thread through 13 countries and roughly 6,000 kilometres of Atlantic coastline before ever reaching Europe.

ECOWAS chair Julius Maada Bio didn’t hide his enthusiasm.

Speaking to the assembled leaders, Bio confirmed the agreement had been signed and told the region not to be surprised when the gas starts flowing their way.

The numbers behind the project are staggering.

Once operational, the pipeline is expected to move 30 billion cubic metres of natural gas every year, with roughly half of that destined for Morocco and European markets via the existing Maghreb-Europe pipeline into Spain the rest feeding West Africa’s own grids, fertiliser plants and factories.

This isn’t a new idea rushed to market.

Morocco’s King Mohammed VI and Nigeria first floated the concept back in 2016, and the current price tag sits at around $27 billion.

Algeria’s 2022 decision to cut off gas exports to Spain through Morocco, amid a diplomatic falling-out, gave the Atlantic route new strategic weight suddenly Europe had a reason to want an alternative corridor, and Morocco had a reason to want to be that corridor’s anchor.

Nigeria’s state oil company NNPC and Morocco’s hydrocarbons agency ONHYM are steering the project jointly, with the Islamic Development Bank and the OPEC Fund for International Development among the backers lining up financing.

In a joint statement, the two agencies said the goal was to link West Africa’s gas resources to major regional markets, while also working to deepen African energy market integration and open a new development corridor connecting West Africa, the Sahel, Morocco and Europe.

The bureaucracy comes next: a project company headquartered in Casablanca, a governing authority based in Abuja, and only after that the courting of outside investors before a final investment decision is locked in.

If it gets built, the payoff is huge.

Analysts point to an estimated 400 million people gaining access to gas-powered electricity, fertiliser production and manufacturing capacity that currently doesn’t exist.

It would also mean Nigeria sitting on Africa’s largest proven gas reserves finally converts more of that resource into regional economic value instead of shipping it out raw.

But the hard part hasn’t started.

Construction isn’t slated to begin until 2028, with first gas deliveries pencilled in for 2031, and that four-to-five-year runway leaves plenty of room for trouble: financing gaps, security risks across a politically unstable Sahel, and a genuine question mark over whether Europe’s appetite for gas will still be there by the time the pipeline is ready to deliver it.

For now, though, West Africa has cleared the hurdle that mattered most political will. Whether money, geology and geopolitics cooperate is the next decade’s problem.