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.
Between maintenance problems, like this time on a Nigerian field, and looting along the way, the Nigerian gas supply is indeed not reliable, but, underlines Jean-Pierre Favennec, consultant and professor at 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,” he explained to RFI.
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.
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