The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Ltd has signed a deal with the China Engineering & Machinery Corporation (CMEC) for the co-funding of the Gwagwalada Independent Power Plant (GIPP) Phase-1 Project.
The Memorandum of Understanding was signed in Beijing, China.
Thr NNPC Ltd.’s Executive Vice President, Gas Power & New Energy, Mr. Olalekan Ogunleye and Chairman of CMEC Nigeria, Mr. Zhang Daguang, signed the agreement on behalf of their respective companies.
Also known as the Abuja IPP, the 350MW GIPP Phase 1 Project is one of the key anchor projects of the Ajaokuta-Kaduna-Kano (AKK) Gas Pipeline Project which is in line with Nigeria’s Gas Master Plan infrastructure blueprint.
Upon completion, the GIPP Phase 1 Project is expected to improve power generation, create job opportunities, reduce gas flaring, and engender industrial development.
The project which was flagged-off in August last year by President Bola Tinubu has been described as a game-changer in Nigeria’s power sector.
It is a 1,350MW Combined Cycle Power Plant with auxiliaries and Balance of Plant to be situated on 547 hectares of land already acquired at Gwagwalada, in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja.
The project is expected to generate between $700m and $800m annually within the first ten years of operations.
The GIPP was necessitated by the need for delivering gas towards additional power generation capacity in Nigeria. Under the plan, gas supply to the Plant will be through the Ajaokuta- Kaduna-Kano (AKK) Gas Pipeline Project which is currently at its advanced stages of construction.
The GIPP’s fuel requirements will be satisfied under a long-term Gas Sales, Purchase and Aggregation Agreement with Shell Petroleum Development Company Joint Venture (SPDC JV).
The GIPP project consists up of three power train blocks of 450MW each. Each block will include two General Electric (GE) gas turbine generators, two heat recovery steam generators (HRSG), one steam turbine electric generator, one direct air-cooling condenser, balance of plant equipment and a black start diesel generator.
On completion, the GIPP Project will generate an average of 10.3 million Megawatt hour (MWh) of electricity per year for sale to the Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading Plc (NBET).
The sales of the generated power will be through Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with the NBET to distribution companies (Discos) under long-term agreements. and direct sale to major off-takers.
Before the GIPP, the NNPCL had commissioned a 50mw Maiduguri Emergency Power plant (MEPP), which is a power generation project aimed at providing reliable and sustainable electricity to the city of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, and its environs.
The project was necessitated by the extended power outages experienced in the region in the last nine years. These outages, caused by vandalism and insurgency attacks on power supply infrastructure, had resulted in a decline in economic activities in the region.
The power generation project, aside from providing reliable and sustainable electricity to the city of Maiduguri, and its environs will also be a significant addition to the many initiatives aimed at ensuring domestic gas utilisation.