Chinese firm to construct Ethiopia-Djibouti 767 km-long gas pipeline

China’s Poly-GCL Petroleum Group Holdings Limited will build a 767 km gas pipeline between Ethiopia’s eastern Ogadem Basin and an export terminal on the Red Sea, Ethiopian Ministry of Mines and Petroleum said.

Ethiopian and Djiboutian government officials agreed that Poly-GCL would begin construction of the pipeline project this year, the ministry said.

Last April, the Ethiopian government announced plans to generate $1 billion a year through the extraction of natural gas and crude oil.

Recently, Poly-GCL discovered 7 to 8 billion cubic feet of natural gas in the Somali regional state of Ethiopia, located in the east of the country.

The production of crude oil would ensure the sustainability of the economic transformation of Ethiopia, which projects to become an industrialized middle-income economy by 2025.

Approximately 700 kilometers of the pipeline will be located in Ethiopia, while the rest of the pipeline will be located in Djibouti.

The total cost of the project has not yet been disclosed, but according to Djibouti’s Energy Minister, Yonis Ali Guedi: “It is the most expensive project ever built in the Horn of Africa region.”

He said the production of crude oil heralds a success after 100 years of trying in vain to find and extract oil in the area.

Poly-GCL, a subsidiary of Golden Concord Group Limited is a mixed ownership clean energy company engaged in exploration and development, storage and transportation and processing, trade marketing and terminal use.