Morocco’s Official Gazette this week published a government decree that allows state-controlled OCP SA to take a 50 percent stake in Basic Chemicals Platform Nigeria Ltd., a joint-venture company established to oversee the development of a $1.3 billion industrial platform to produce ammonia and fertilizers in Nigeria’s Akwa Ibom State, Bloomberg reported.
The joint venture company was set up by OCP and Nigeria Agriculture Investment Co., a unit of the West African country’s sovereign wealth fund, Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA). OCP and NSIA on March 2 inked a Shareholders Agreement for the creation of the joint venture company (GM March 5, p. 1).
The proposed multipurpose industrial platform will utilize Nigerian gas and Moroccan phosphate to produce 750,000 mt/y of ammonia under a first phase development and 1 million mt of phosphate fertilizers annually from 2025, said OCP in a statement last month.
Among several other agreements signed in early March between the Moroccan fertilizers group and Nigerian companies was a Framework Agreement with Mobil Producing Nigeria (MPN), the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), the Gas Aggregation Company Nigeria (GACN), and the NSIA on gas supply for the industrial platform.
In a separate development this week, Akwa Ibom State governor Udom Emmanuel, as part of his Easter Message last weekend, said work would soon start on the new Ibom deep seaport in the state, according to a This Day Live report. Nigeria’s Federal Executive Council (FEC) approved the license two months ago for the port, which will serve the proposed ammonia and fertilizer plant, among other developments in the state.