Marrakech – On Sunday, in Freetown, an idea that had drifted for a decade finally acquired a signature. The heads of state of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) approved the intergovernmental agreement (IGA) governing the Nigeria-Morocco Atlantic gas pipeline – a line of roughly 6,800 kilometers built to carry Nigerian gas up the West African coast to Morocco, and from there toward Europe. “Don’t be surprised when the gas comes your way,” the bloc’s chair, Sierra Leone’s Julius Maada Bio, told the summit.
The scale alone commands attention. The pipeline is designed to move up to 30 billion cubic meters of gas a year – about 15 billion of it earmarked for Moroccan and European markets through the existing link to Spain – and could ultimately export more than half of Nigeria’s current output, much of it still wasted through flaring. Bashir Bayo Ojulari, CEO of NNPC, the project’s Nigerian co-owner, expressed the same capacity in daily terms: roughly 3 billion cubic feet of gas per day (3 Bcf/d), carried to markets along the coast and onward to Europe.
The feasibility and engineering studies are done, including completion of Front-End Engineering Design (FEED) studies, finalization of route reconnaissance surveys, advancement of environmental and social studies, and establishment of key legal, regulatory, and commercial frameworks. These milestones position the project for the implementation phase.
Built largely offshore, the project, officially named the African Atlantic Gas Pipeline (AAGP), would be the longest underwater gas pipeline in the world. The cost is put near $25 billion, close to €23 billion.
The next phase is corporate: ONHYM, Morocco’s hydrocarbons office, and Nigeria’s NNPC will establish a jointly owned project company (SPV) in Casablanca – the commercial vehicle meant to raise the financing and steer the pipeline to a final investment decision (FID) – with a Pipeline Higher Authority (PHA) to govern the line seated in Abuja.
Morocco converted ONHYM into a joint-stock company this year expressly to make that partnership legally possible, mirroring Nigeria’s own corporatization of NNPC in 2021. A separate signing with Mauritania, in the presence of Nigeria’s president, is still to come.
Predictably, the reaction from Algiers and its sympathizers was swift and dismissive. The project, they argue, is too long, too expensive, and improbably led by a country that pumps almost no gas of its own. A rival line – the Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline, linking Nigeria to Algeria through Niger – is shorter, cheaper, crosses only three countries, and is already under construction after Algeria broke ground in June. On paper, the comparison flatters Algiers. On strategy, it misses the point entirely.
A pipeline, or a development spine?
Take first the charge that the Moroccan route is too long and touches too many states. It runs 6,800 kilometers against the Trans-Saharan’s roughly 4,100, and it threads thirteen countries rather than three. Critics read this as waste. It is closer to the reverse.
The Trans-Saharan is an evacuation tube. It crosses the emptiness of the Sahara from the Niger Delta to Algeria’s existing network and out to Europe, integrating almost nothing between its endpoints.
The Atlantic pipeline was drawn to do the opposite. Beyond Nigeria and Morocco, it is meant to serve eleven states along the way – Benin, Togo, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, the Gambia, and Mauritania – hugging the coast where West Africa actually lives, feeding power stations, industry, and mining, and reaching inland to fold the landlocked Sahel into the same grid through planned interconnections. ONHYM puts the population within reach of the corridor at around 400 million people.
The stakes there are steep. Roughly 42% of Africans still lack reliable electricity at home, and a continent with 19% of the world’s people draws only 3.1% of its power, the Atlantic Council reported in September 2025. Feeding gas to its eleven transit states, the same report judged, could make the line the most important piece of infrastructure on the continent.
That is why the phased design matters more than the headline distance. The first connections are meant to link Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire in the south with Morocco, Senegal, and Mauritania in the north, building regional demand before the full spine is laid.
It is a deliberate answer to the graveyard of African megaprojects that never found financing over the past fifty years: generate revenue early, de-risk as you go. A shorter pipe that serves three economies is not automatically superior to a longer one that knits together more than a dozen. It is simply cheaper. Cheaper and smaller are not the same as more consequential.
Two oceans Algeria does not have
The second charge – that Morocco holds no gas and therefore has no business anchoring a gas project – confuses ownership with position. Corridors are not won only by the states that sit on the reserves. They are won by the states that command the route to market. Turkey sells almost none of the gas that crosses it, and Europe treats it as indispensable anyway.
Morocco’s asset is geography, and it is one Algeria cannot replicate. Morocco is the only country in the region that fronts both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The pipeline is engineered to connect at its northern end to the Maghreb-Europe line already running to Spain – the very conduit Algeria let lapse in 2022 after severing relations with Rabat.
Around that link, Morocco is assembling the hardware of an energy hub: a floating regasification terminal planned at Nador West Med, the Mediterranean deepwater port due online this year; Dakhla Atlantic on the southern coast, now past 60% built and conceived explicitly as the Sahel’s window on the ocean; and Tanger Med, already among the busiest transshipment ports on the planet.
Algeria has powerful Mediterranean outlets of its own and remains Europe’s second-largest pipeline supplier. What it lacks is an Atlantic face. That is not a footnote. The entire premise of Morocco’s project – and of the wider royal strategy behind it – is that the Atlantic basin, not the Mediterranean alone, is where Africa’s next trade geography will be written.
Europe supplies the pull. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the bloc has been racing to replace Russian pipeline gas and to phase out the rest by the end of the decade. A stable southern corridor with an Atlantic terminus is exactly the kind of diversification Brussels has been paying to find.
The King’s African bet
None of this would hold without politics, and here the contrast is sharpest. The Oxford energy scholar Ali Aissaoui, quoted by Middle East Eye in an otherwise skeptical piece, named the decisive precondition for any pipeline of this magnitude: a stable and cooperative political environment among all the states involved. Over the horizon this project occupies, that test bends toward Rabat.
Morocco has spent a decade building the relationships the pipeline now rests on. It rejoined the African Union in 2017. In November 2023, King Mohammed VI launched the Atlantic Initiative, offering the landlocked Sahel states – Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Chad – road, rail, and port access to the ocean through Moroccan territory.
Their foreign ministers embraced it at a coordination meeting in Marrakech in December 2023, reaffirmed it before the King in Rabat in April 2025, and repeated their support at the United Nations in September 2025. For four states that had drifted from nearly every traditional partner, Morocco arrived holding open a door to the sea.
Algeria’s record with those same neighbors ran the other way. Its ties to the Sahel bloc collapsed in 2025 after it shot down a Malian military drone near their shared border, prompting Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso to pull their ambassadors in unison and to brand the act an aggression against their confederation.
Bamako pressed further, accusing Algiers of backing armed groups it fights – a charge Algeria denies, but one that shows how far the trust had eroded. Ambassadors returned only this month, in a thaw most analysts still call fragile. A pipeline is a forty-year commitment. It is fair to ask which capital the Sahel would rather stake four decades on.
The legal ground beneath Morocco’s Atlantic pivot has firmed as well. In October 2025, UN Security Council Resolution 2797 endorsed Morocco’s Autonomy Plan for Western Sahara as the realistic basis for a settlement, with the United States, France, and the United Kingdom behind it and Algeria declining to take part in the vote.
That bears directly on the pipeline, because Dakhla – the Atlantic anchor of the whole design – sits in the south. The diplomatic current that once cast the territory as a liability is now underwriting its ports. Since then, several countries, particularly France and the United States, have encouraged their companies to explore opportunities in the region, while a growing number of firms have shown interest in investing there and contributing directly to its economic development.
The irony is sharp. The territory routinely branded a “conflict” – Morocco’s Western Sahara – is the stable, developed, port-building south that anchors this entire corridor, from Dakhla’s new Atlantic harbor to the roads reaching toward Mauritania. The genuine insecurity lies elsewhere: around Tindouf and Algeria’s deep Sahara, a zone Washington and other capitals rate “do not travel” over terrorism and kidnapping, and where a US alert once warned of abduction risk near the Tindouf camps themselves.
The trust beneath the pipe
A forty-year pipeline is, in the end, a bet on trust, and Morocco has spent years accumulating the kind that does not appear on a balance sheet. When Burkina Faso’s junta detained four French agents in Ouagadougou in December 2023, it was not Paris that won their freedom a year later. It was King Mohammed VI, whose quiet mediation with Captain Ibrahim Traoré delivered the release in December 2024. Macron thanked Rabat by name.
Morocco has since been drawn into other Sahel files, from detained officials to hostages seized by armed groups, precisely because it is one of the few capitals that both the military governments and the West still take calls from.
That standing rests on a choice Rabat made early. When the monarch launched the Atlantic Initiative, he argued that the Sahel’s crises would not be solved by security and military measures alone, but by cooperation and shared development. It was a deliberate break with the French-led military approach that had collapsed across the region, and with the mercenaries and arms that rushed to fill the vacuum.
Morocco offered roads, ports, and markets instead. For governments fighting jihadist insurgencies and, in Mali’s case, a Tuareg separatist revolt as well, a partner that treats development as the front line – and that knows, from its own long confrontation with separatism, what that fight costs – is a rare thing.
There is also a channel Algeria cannot open. The Moroccan king is Amir al-Mu’minin, Commander of the Faithful, a religious authority whose weight has been felt for centuries in Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, and northern Nigeria. The bond is older than any modern border. For more than a thousand years, trans-Saharan trade and scholarship tied Morocco to West Africa, and since the eighteenth century the link has run above all through the Tijaniyya, the Sufi order founded in Fez in 1784. Its founder’s tomb still draws tens of thousands of West African pilgrims to the city each year, and its followers across Senegal, Nigeria, and the Sahel number in the hundreds of millions.
Morocco has turned that spiritual kinship into policy. In 2015 the King opened the Mohammed VI Institute for the Training of Imams in Rabat, which schools preachers – women among them – from Mali, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, and beyond in the Maliki-Ash’ari-Sufi tradition the kingdom promotes as a moderate counterweight to imported radicalism. The same year he created the Mohammed VI Foundation of African Ulema, based in Fez, to coordinate the continent’s religious scholars against extremist recruitment.
Moroccan-built mosques now anchor neighborhoods in Abidjan and Conakry. This is soft power, and it serves Morocco’s interests as all statecraft does. But it buys something a gas contract cannot: legitimacy that predates the modern state system and outlasts any single government in Bamako, Niamey, or Ouagadougou.
None of this is separate from the gas. It is the ground the gas rests on. The pipeline is one strand of a wider royal design that also runs through OCP’s fertilizer diplomacy – Morocco has made itself a pillar of African food security, and Rabat and Abuja are already exploring joint fertilizer production – and through the vision of an integrated African Atlantic, from Dakhla north to Tangier, as the continent’s outlet to Europe and the Americas.
Each initiative reinforces the others. A state that trains a country’s imams, feeds its fields, mediates its hostage crises, and offers it the sea is not merely selling it gas. It is offering a relationship. That is the asset the Algerian ledger cannot capture, and it is why the Sahel keeps turning to Rabat.
What a signature can and cannot do
The signature also has a lineage, and a long road still ahead. The idea dates to 2016, when King Mohammed VI carried it to Abuja and found a partner in then-Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari; Bola Ahmed Tinubu has kept it moving since. Algeria’s 2022 decision to shut the Maghreb-Europe line gave the project fresh urgency, and that September the two countries’ energy firms sealed a memorandum in Rabat.
In December 2024, at its 66th ordinary summit, ECOWAS adopted the intergovernmental agreement that Freetown has now turned into signatures. The next chapters are already sketched to court investors toward the final investment decision – the point at which the money is actually committed and the pipeline stops being a plan. In May, ONHYM’s Amina Benkhadra took the pitch to Washington, where US officials voiced genuine interest in the project.
None of this makes the pipeline inevitable, and honest advocates should say so. The hard part lies ahead. No financing is locked; the final investment decision has not been taken; construction is targeted for 2028; and first gas is not promised before 2031, and the Trans-Saharan is pouring concrete while the Atlantic line is still forming its project company. A signature in Freetown is not a finished pipe. But the project has outlasted every delay thrown at it for a decade, and it is moving faster now than at any point since 2016.
But the Algerian critique measures the wrong things. It counts kilometers, reserves, and construction starts, and concludes that the smaller, cheaper line must be the stronger one. Morocco is playing a different game. It is using a pipeline to bind thirteen coastal states, four Sahelian ones, and a European market into a corridor it controls – and layering onto it trade, faith, food, and diplomacy until the gas is only the visible part. Whether or not the first molecule reaches Tangier in 2031, that map has already been redrawn. Rabat turned a pipe into a foreign policy. Its rivals are still counting pipe.
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