Nigeria’s long-delayed gas backbone has cleared its hardest hurdle. In late December the Nigerian National Petroleum Company told President Bola Tinubu it had completed welding the main line of the Ajaokuta-Kaduna-Kano pipeline, including the crossing of the River Niger, a technical challenge that had stalled the project for years. With the mainline closed, the company said it would begin final connections in 2026 and start moving gas north.
The numbers behind the AKK are large. The 614-kilometre, 40-inch line, costing about $2.8bn, runs from Ajaokuta in Kogi State through Abuja and Kaduna to Kano, and forms part of the wider Trans-Nigeria Gas Pipeline. Once in service it is designed to move around two billion standard cubic feet of gas a day to three planned power plants in Abuja, Kaduna and Kano, along with fertiliser, petrochemical and other gas-based industries.
First conceived in 2008 and flagged off in 2020, the pipeline had slipped repeatedly, with first gas once promised for early 2025. NNPC now targets commissioning in 2026, with first supply toward Abuja expected during the year. Officials cast the line as infrastructure that will displace diesel in northern industrial zones and seed new industrial parks along its route.
For a country sitting on more than 200 trillion cubic feet of proven gas yet starved of reliable power, moving that gas to where it can be burned for electricity and industry is the central task. The AKK is the most visible piece of that effort.
Why this matters
Why this matters for gas-to-power
Gas is the bridge fuel for Nigeria’s power transition, and the binding constraint has never been reserves but the infrastructure to carry gas to where it is needed. A working AKK adds a major artery, deepening the domestic gas market that thermal generation, captive plants and CNG all draw on. More gas reaching more of the country improves both the availability and, over time, the economics of gas-fired power.
For Nova Utilities, whose gas-fired captive and embedded plants and CNG supply depend on dependable feedstock, a stronger gas backbone is a tailwind. It reinforces the case for gas as the practical near-term alternative to diesel, and for distributed operators able to put that gas to work close to industrial and commercial demand.