Inside Emeka Okwuosa’s multi-billion Gabon gas deal

By Funsho Arogundade

Emeka Okwuosa, a Nigerian engineer and energy tycoon, has a mission for Africa’s future hydrocarbons architecture. It is to deploy African technical capacity to achieve African energy security. Okwuosa has already started in his native Nigeria where he has successfully built his firm, OilServ Limited, into one of Nigeria’s largest indigenous oil and gas groups with expertise in Engineering, Procurement, Construction, Installation and Commissioning (EPCIC) enterprise.

Okwuosa has been entrusted with multibillion-dollar national infrastructure, especially the laying of the pipeline network carrying the country’s gas. Indeed, in the last two decades, what his firm has built since is substantial. By the company’s own count, Oilserv has completed 19 major pipeline projects covering more than 930 kilometres, carried out 76 pipeline leak repairs, constructed 28 above-ground facilities and performed 18 major horizontal directional drilling operations.

In July, OilServ completed the largest single piece of energy infrastructure Nigeria has ever attempted: the first phase (the 303-kilometre section) of the Ajaokuta-Kaduna-Kano (AKK) Gas pipeline. The full AKK pipeline runs 614 kilometres at a cost of about $2.8 billion. The planned pipeline is meant to carry gas from Southern Nigeria to the industrial north and eventually toward Morocco and Europe. The company also built the Obiafu-Obrikom-Oben (OB3) line that moves gas out of the eastern Niger Delta.

Less than three months after it wrapped up the first phase of the AKK Gas Pipeline, the Oraifite, Anambra State-born Okwuosa has gone looking for the next market within a few months. And his firm has sealed a new strategic deal in the Central African nation of Gabon.

OilServ has signed a milestone agreement in the Gabonese capital, Libreville to develop hydrocarbon reserves in two Gabonese blocks, marking his first move into Central Africa and a return to a country he worked in as a young engineer.

The agreement, signed with Clotaire Kondja, Gabon’s Minister of Petroleum and Gas, covers the DEF-3 and D4-5 blocks. It also commits OilServ to building the gas transportation, compression and treatment infrastructure needed to move and process gas from the blocks.

Gabon’s gas market is projected to reach $2.12 billion by 2031. It has reasons to prefer an African contractor. The Central African nation has been pushing for energy sovereignty and its state oil company pre-empted Carlyle’s sale of Assala Energy to France’s Maurel & Prom in 2023, buying the 45,000 barrel-a-day assets itself for around $1 billion with $800 million in financing from the trader Gunvor. But Gabon is poised to learn from Nigeria’s history of managing its vast deposits of hydrocarbons.

Okwuosa said the agreement places Oilserv at the intersection of Gabon’s resource development, energy infrastructure, gas monetisation and national energy security.