A new pipeline project to bring Nigerian gas through Africa to Europe has been launched by the sovereign wealth funds of Nigeria and Morocco, the latest attempt to link Nigeria’s vast gas resources with the lucrative European gas market. The Trans-African Pipeline will be developed jointly by the Moroccan sovereign wealth fund Ithmar Capital and the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority. Nigeria has huge gas reserves but few options for monetizing the gas other than its LNG export facility. A previous pipeline project (the Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline) was agreed on between Nigeria’s NNPC and Algeria’s Sonatrach in 2002, and an intergovernmental accord signed in 2009. But there has been little progress on the project since, given the huge distances involved and the high cost of developing such a vast pipeline project.
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