Construction of longest oil pipeline project in Africa on track

Ongoing works on the Niger-Benin oil pipeline project is on track.  Niger’s President announced that the project is currently at 30% complete.

The project measuring, 2,000km long is set to be longest cross-border crude pipeline in Africa. It is being built by the West African Oil Pipeline Company (WAPCO), a subsidiary of the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC).

The Niger-Benin oil pipeline project will run from Agadem in Niger to Port Seme on the Atlantic coast in Benin. Initial plan was to build the Niger Chad Oil Pipeline, which would have connected in Chad with the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline but that plan was abandoned, reportedly “because of a ‘poor experience’ with Chadian authorities.

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Niger-Benin oil pipeline project

The pipe will have a 1275 Km section running through Niger and 675Km running through Benin, transmitting crude oil seamlessly between the two neighbors. Worley, an Australian engineering house, worked on the basic design of an offshore pipeline section stretching from Port Seme, extending approximately 14.8 kilometers out of the sea. The offshore section will help load the oil into tankers through a well-designed single-buoy mooring system.

The offshore terminal will comprise two parallel 28-inch subsea pipelines, a pipeline-end manifold, and one single-buoy mooring system designed with six mooring anchors. According to the pipeline’s design, the entire pipeline system, including nine pumping stations, will have approximately 90,000 barrels of crude oil per day, with the oil transported from the Agadem basin after completing the CNPC’s second-phase development in the basin.

The project is expected to be commissioned at the end of 2023. CNPC currently produces only about 15,000 bopd from Niger to supply its 20,000 bpd SORAZ Refinery. Once the pipeline is operational, the Chinese operator intends to ramp up its production to 110,000 bopd, most of which would be exported.