While Ghanaians have been experiencing power cuts for months, the country’s electricity operators have announced three weeks of increased disruptions due to “maintenance work” in Nigeria. Nigeria indeed supplies gas to one of Ghana’s main power plants. But this supply is far from reliable.
2 mins
For twenty years, the large Takoradi power station on the Ghanaian coast has been supplied by a gas pipeline of around 700 km, the West African Gas Pipeline, powered by Nigerian gas. But this flow is anything but regular, underlines Philippe Sébille-Lopez, oil geopolitician.
“ This gas pipeline has never been 100% operational. At certain times, there was no need to even do compression because there was not enough gas to send ! Nigeria would have to be able to maintain constant gas production capacity, and that has never been the case. »
Two thirds of electricity comes from gas
Between maintenance problems, like this time on a Nigerian field, and looting along the way, the Nigerian gas supply is not reliable, but, underlines Jean-Pierre Favennec, consultant and professor at the IFP School, the problem also comes from Ghana. “ Ghanaian electricity companies are struggling to get their bills paid by customers, so they have no money when they buy gas to pay the bills. The Nigerians therefore prefer to send their gas to be liquefied in Boni because there, it is LNG which is sold in Europe and which brings in very substantial revenues. “.
The vagaries of Nigerian supply are all the more problematic as Ghana depends almost two-thirds on gas for its electricity, without having developed its own gas fields for this use. And another third of the current is of hydroelectric origin, but the Akosombo dam is suffering from drought and its power plant needs to be modernized.
Read alsoGhana: the electricity network will be disrupted for three weeks