About 45 km of shallow-water offshore pipeline has been installed linking the Jubilee gas fields, operated by partners Tullow Plc, Kosmos, Anadarko, PetroSA and the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation, to a gas-processing plant at the coastal town of Atuabo that Ghana’s President John Mahama said on January 26 is at the commissioning phase. A 111-km main onshore pipeline also has been laid from Atuabo to Aboadaze, while Sinopec is also working on the 75-km onshore lateral pipeline to link Essiama to Prestea, both towns in Ghana's Western Region.

Los Angeles-based professional technical and management support services firm AECOM has been the consulting engineer and construction management supervisor and technical trainer during the project’s implementation under a $15.6-million contract awarded in 2013. The contract is renewable annually. Sinopec and the project developer Ghana National Gas Co. could not immediately respond to requests for the technical design details of the three gas pipeline components.

Mozambique has also launched feasibility of the viability of constructing a 2100-km pipeline from Cabo Delgado to the country’s capital Maputo. Mozambique’s state-owned ENH has signed an agreement with South Africa clean energy developer Gigajoule International Ltd for the study after the latter completed pre-feasibility study in 2013.

The $5-billion gas pipeline, according to ENH, is to increase domestic consumption of the estimated 150 trillion cu ft in the Rovuma basin, where U.S. energy company Anadarko and Italy’s Eni are the main players.

“We have substantial natural gas discoveries and the idea is to see if it is possible to bring this gas to the south of the country and develop other industries, which could support the construction of the pipeline,” ENH chairman Nelson Ocuane said previously.

“We estimate that Mozambique would need to dedicate less than 7% of the already proven gas reserves to make a project like this (pipeline) economically viable,” said Johan de Vos, Gigajoule managing director.

Elsewhere in East Africa, Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda are in the final phase of picking a consultant for the feasibility study and design of the construction of the 1,300-km crude pipeline from Hoima in Uganda’s Albertine basin, where an estimated 6.5 billion bbl of crude reserves have been discovered, to the Kenyan coast. The pipeline will be constructed in two sections, the first from Hoima to the Uganda/Kenya border and the second from the border point through Lokichar basin in northwest Kenya,  where UK’s Tullow Oil Plc and Canada’s Africa Oil have discovered 600 million barrels, to Kenya’s coastal town of Lamu. A 9-km pipeline will be constructed from a tank terminal at Lamu to offshore mooring buoys.

A joint statement by the three governments said late last year they have opted for a single consultant to ensure consistency in quality of the pipeline.

The countries have also revived the 352-km multiproduct fuel pipeline extension project for the existing Western Kenya pipeline, which transports fuel products from the port city of Mombasa to markets in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

The pipeline will be extended from Eldoret in western Kenya to Uganda’s capital Kampala with an extension to Rwanda’s capital of Kigali.