Not just a ‘pipe’ dream, Morocco-Nigeria gas line set to transform Africa

There also vast fertile arable lands estimated at tens of millions of unused hectares. It holds 10% of the world's internal renewable freshwater resources but is inhabited by only 17% of the world's population, estimated at 8 billion.

The continent's young population is also a great asset in an aging world faced with extreme weather conditions.

Effects of Ukraine war

Africa moved to the forefront of global strategist's attention as the world order was upended by Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The energy shortages, price inflation and other economic and social challenges in countries opposed to Russia ended a period when major world powers were happy to ignore their less fortunate neighbours across the Mediterranean, even during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Read more: US-China competition in Africa heats up with Beijing in the lead

France demonstrates the pattern through its political support for Algeria. The former colonial power now needs new sources of raw materials and energy at the lowest cost. Paris has also turned to Niger for supplies of uranium to operate its nuclear power plants to keep the City of Lights illuminated at all times.

Morocco back in AU after 34 years

Morocco re-joined the African Union in 2017, ending a 34-year split over a territorial dispute in the Sahara between the country and indigenous Sahrawi people in the west of the desert. The return helped spark a transformation for the continent, via a new power grouping of 44 countries including Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Egypt, Gabon, Congo, and Rwanda.

United by their shared goals for moderation and economic freedom, the group established the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) in 2018, which now includes 54 African Union countries.

A visit by Morocco's King Mohammed VI to Abuja in 2016 succeeded in restoring good relations between Nigeria and Morocco, strengthening their economic ties, and marking a historic shift.

During a meeting at the COP22 climate talks in Marrakesh, the two leaders agreed on the importance of development in the continent, and the role they must each play as the first and fifth biggest economies.

In their meetings, Mohammed VI proposed to Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari a plan for strategic cooperation in energy and food security. It entailed the construction of a natural gas pipeline linking the countries, breaking Nigeria's geographical isolation, strengthening its regional role, and improving its economic standing.

Morocco would also build an industrial unit to produce phosphate fertilisers to help improve Nigeria's agricultural and food production, boosting its capacity to feed its population of around 212 million.

Nigeria welcomed the proposals, and in June 2018 an agreement was signed in Rabat to build the 5,660-long liquified natural gas (LNG) pipeline at an estimated cost of $25 billion. It will serve 17 countries in west and north Africa across the Atlantic, reaching Europe via Spain.

The size of the area's economy as measured by gross domestic product (GDP) is $900 billion, of which $726 billion comes from the 15 countries of the Economic Community of the West African States, in addition to Morocco's GDP of $133 billion and Mauritania's GDP of $8 billion, according to World Bank 2022 data.

The pipeline agreement and the success of the international grouping behind it contrasts with the record of the Arab Maghreb Union. It was established in Marrakesh in 1989, and included Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania, and has not achieved its goal.

While the sub-Saharan countries were brought closer together by their shared economic interests, politics divided the countries of the Great Arab Maghreb — an area bigger than the European Union at over 6 million square kilometres. The region includes nearly 100 million people and is in a strategic location between the Mediterranean and the Sahara.                  

Importance of geography

Geography can be vital to investment success. This logic applies in more than one way to the Abuja-Rabat gas pipeline.

Nigeria is situated on the Atlantic at the Gulf of Guinea. That geographical reality limits the export options for its massive gas reserves. The only way it can reach distant markets has been via shipping.

This constraint has posed a mounting challenge for the country's expansion ambitions for production, export, and economic development. Revenues were also constrained by the deteriorating state of existing pipes, low maintenance, and bureaucracy.

Many African countries with energy or minerals resources suffer from low revenues and underdevelopment due to a dependence on low-value raw exports. This economic situation is a direct result of European colonisation which has robbed them of the opportunity to diversify their economies in the manner of their European counterparts.

Without industrialisation, the countries end up relying on limited or single sources of national income, which delays their social and economic progress, increases dependence on external actors, and increases the chances for revenues to be used for arms purchases to fight border wars left over from colonial times.

In 1995, several British and American companies, including Shell and Chevron, reached an agreement to establish a gas pipeline from Nigeria to nearby countries Benin, Togo, and Ghana.

Dubbed the West African Gas Pipeline, or WAPCo, the project aimed to seed a regional gas market. But without the infrastructure required for international trade, such as ports, and amid other economic challenges, the project faltered, hit by delays and, when completed in 2006, a small capacity.

Now, the countries of the Economic Community of West Africa see the new Nigeria-Morocco link as a huge opportunity to resurrect the WAPCo project, integrating the two into a colossal pipeline which will allow for the transport of up to 5,000 billion cubic meters of gas.

Each country has its own economic and geostrategic calculations. But the commercial and developmental advantages of the pipeline would benefit the entire West Atlantic Africa region, which is suffering today from severe electricity shortages that impede its economic development despite a wealth of natural resources.

Largest underwater gas carrier in Africa

Thirteen countries from north and west Africa have so far agreed to build the pipeline, which will be the largest underwater gas carrier in the continent, hundreds of meters deep in the Atlantic on to the Mediterranean and into Spain.

Reaffirming Rabat's commitment to the project, King Mohammed VI stressed the importance of the gas pipeline during his annual speech given to commemorate the country's Green March which returned the province of Spanish Sahara to Morocco.

"This pipeline is more than just a bilateral project between two sister nations," he said. "We want it to be a strategic project that offers all West Africa, a region home to more than 440 million people, opportunities and guarantees in energy security and economic, industrial, and social development."

The king explained that the project would form a link between Africa and Europe for present and future generations.   

It was the first time the pipeline was mentioned in a royal speech. It silenced sceptics, who had been speculating that the project would face delays from technical difficulties, financing or even political challenges.

Algerian opposition

In contrast with the involvement of much of the rest of Africa to the Moroccan-Nigerian project, Algeria does not hide its hostility and opposition to it. Both locally and regionally, Algeria does not want moves toward the integration of north and west Africa into a joint economic area, which would be worth over $1.2 trillion and 650 million people.

The country's opposition is not the first of its kind. Algeria had proposed the construction of another competing pipeline passing through the Niger desert, and the eastern Sahel countries, in a highly dangerous and semi-empty region of endless desert.

It has economic and geopolitical reasons for its opposition. As Algeria sees it, the massive project would lead to a renaissance in Morocco that could boost its economic and political positions, attracting investments from the Gulf, EU, the US, and even Israel, which the African Union granted observer status in 2021.  

Opec support

The Ukraine war and the EU's boycott of Russia, which exported around 155 billion cubic meters of gas in 2021, have pushed the Nigeria-Morocco pipeline to the forefront of the international agenda. As the EU searches for alternative energy suppliers, the international media and western construction and financing companies have turned their attention to the project.

The Economic Community of West African States has persuaded the international community that the project is feasible.

This is perhaps because the pipeline is expected to link together a total area of about 11 million square kilometres out of the 30 million that make up all of Africa, a massive region in which about 527 million people of the continent's 1.426 billion people live.

It is also believed that Opec's support for the pipeline amounts to an indication of Gulf backing. The project managed to secure $14 million in funding in April from the Opec's International Development. That will cover the second phase of the pre-final engineering studies that plot route of the pipeline over land and sea.

It will also cover the examination of potential environmental, natural, social, and economic repercussions on aquatic populations. The project had also previously received funding from the Islamic Development Bank in Jeddah.

Some have speculated that the project may have been delayed, pointing to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, longer-than-expected technical and geophysical studies, or the sheer size of some of the companies involved.

Whatever else, extending a 7,000 kilometre pipeline, mainly under the Atlantic Ocean, is an unprecedented industrial undertaking on a global scale and might mark a new era for underwater pipes that are more technologically advanced.

This is what the engineers are keen to get across to politicians. Solving the energy crisis sparked by the Russia-Ukraine war requires time and much intelligence.

Gas in exchange for development

After the impact of the war in Ukraine, the European Union is not in agreement on energy policy, with each country looking for an individual solution. Spain has emerged among the first Europeans to show interest in the new pipeline, which is expected to reach its coast, giving Spain an advantage with a direct connection to LNG supplies via the Morocco-Europe pipeline.

Since the war began, Madrid has taken a more active role in supplying Europe with gas to face the cold winter. Tensions between Spain and Algeria picked up when the latter favoured the Italian energy company Eni for business. Spain currently backs Morocco politically and economically on this new pipeline project.

Repsol, the Spanish exploration and production company, has expressed interest in constructing the part of the pipeline that will pass through Morocco, almost half of the total distance.

Spain has emerged as a relative winner in Europe's gas crisis, as the arrival point of LNG imports from the US, on which Morocco has also since Algeria halted shipments.

Madrid isn't showing all of its cards just yet in this energy game involving the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, but it's looking to benefit from supply projects, if only to learn from their mistakes or to offer them a temporary alternative, as in the case of the Morocco-Algeria dispute, which is currently under mediation from a number of Arab countries.

Germany is also getting behind the project with its specialised companies. During a visit to Dakar early last summer, Chancellor Olaf Scholz expressed an intention to finance the Senegalese part of the pipeline, as part of cooperation on renewable energies and green hydrogen. Scholz was focused on ways to bypass reliance on Russian gas by diversifying partnerships and energy sources.

Rabat is betting on the completion of the project in the next few years, perhaps around the year 2030, hoping it will help it strengthen its ties with Europe as a helpful partner that is not an EU member but not quite an outsider.

The big challenge remains: how can countries of the Global South benefit from the new world order as full partners, independent of any East-West conflicts and dealing with a club that includes Western Europe, Russia, China, and an American hegemon that is governed by money and run by technology?