The 2000-kilometer long project will be the longest cross-border crude pipeline in Africa when completed. The West African Oil Pipeline Company (WAPCO), a division of the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), is building it.
The proposed Niger-Benin oil pipeline will connect Agadem in Niger with Port Seme on Benin’s Atlantic coast.
The pipe will have a 1275 km section running through Niger and a 675 km 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 scheduled to be completed by the end of 2023. CNPC currently produces only about 15,000 bpd from Niger to supply its 20,000 bpd SORAZ Refinery. Once the pipeline is operational, the Chinese operator plans to increase production to 110,000 bpd, with the majority of the output exported.
