THE Nigerian senate has announced that it officially approved a treaty legalising the country’s involvement in the west African natural gas pipeline project that links Benin, Ghana, and Togo, although the other three countries have already ratified the Economic Community of West African States’ treaty on the project.
In November, the World Bank announced it had approved a loan worth $125 million to help build the gas pipeline, which aims to transport natural gas from fields in southern Nigeria and the Gulf of Guinea to Lagos and along the west African coast to Ghana, Togo and Benin. Backers of the 678-km pipeline hope that it will help to streamline and harmonise energy policies across the impoverished region, where the vast majority of citizens are without regular supplies of electricity.
The gas pipeline project is expected to provide cheap, efficient, and environmentally-friendly fuel to the consuming countries, to lower the cost of power in these countries, and to improve the competitiveness of goods and services, project officials said. The project is a bid to reduce the environmental cost of energy use in Africa by replacing high-pollutant fuels such as crude and heavy crude oil types with cleaner-burning natural gas.
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