Executive Summary
EACOP took roughly five years from intergovernmental agreement to Final Investment Decision, and three more to close debt financing, for a two-country, 1,443km pipeline with four named shareholders. NMGP is proposing to move from this month's IGA to construction in two years, and to first gas in five, for a thirteen-country, 6,900km pipeline with no financing structure yet in place. The comparison is the clearest test available of whether NMGP's timeline is realistic or aspirational.
A Reference Point, Not a Perfect Match
Four days before ECOWAS heads of state signed the Nigeria-Morocco Gas Pipeline's Intergovernmental Agreement, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline was sitting at roughly 84 percent complete, four years past its own Final Investment Decision and still finalizing the last tranches of its debt. EACOP is not a perfect comparison for NMGP. It moves oil, not gas; it links two countries, not thirteen; it runs 1,443 kilometres, not 6,900. But it is the only large, cross-border African pipeline that has gone through the entire governance and financing cycle in recent memory, from political agreement to physical construction. That makes it the most useful yardstick available for reading what NMGP has actually just achieved, and what still stands between this signing and gas actually moving.
Two Governance Models, Built Differently on Purpose
EACOP runs through a single special purpose company, EACOP Ltd, governed by one Shareholders Agreement with four named owners: TotalEnergies at 62 percent, Uganda National Oil Company and Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation at 15 percent each, and CNOOC at 8 percent. One document, four addresses, clear accountability. NMGP has chosen the opposite structure: a Casablanca-based project company paired with an Abuja-headquartered Pipeline Higher Authority, backed by thirteen governments rather than four corporate shareholders. There is no NMGP equivalent yet of "TotalEnergies 62 percent." What exists is a legal framework and the promise of institutions still to be built. That is not a criticism so much as a fact worth sitting with: this week's signing is closer to EACOP's 2017-era milestones than to its 2022 Final Investment Decision.
The Financing Gap Is Where the Comparison Gets Uncomfortable
EACOP was originally structured as 60 percent debt to 40 percent equity on a $5 billion project. Then more than 40 global banks publicly ruled out financing it, under pressure from the StopEACOP campaign over environmental and social concerns. Shareholders absorbed the shortfall by injecting more of their own equity, pushing the ratio to roughly 52:48, while TotalEnergies floated its own bonds to help cover the gap. Debt financing finally closed in March 2025, more than three years after FID, through a syndicate led by African regional lenders including Afreximbank, Standard Bank, Stanbic, and KCB Uganda, alongside Chinese lenders. Total project cost climbed from $5 billion to $5.6 billion in the process. NMGP is currently estimated at $25 to 27 billion, roughly five times EACOP's cost, for a pipeline nearly five times its length, and has no financing structure of any kind attached to this week's agreement.
Workforce Data Tells the Same Story From a Different Angle
EACOP's employment figures vary by source and by what is being counted. Uganda's Petroleum Directorate projects 14,000 direct jobs, 45,000 indirect, and 105,000 induced employment opportunities at full build. Tanzania's Energy Minister reported 10,000 direct-and-indirect jobs generated so far in the implementation phase, 75 percent of them held by Tanzanian citizens, alongside more than 200 local firms awarded contracts. A separate industry tally puts direct jobs at 24,000, splitting 14,000 in Uganda and 10,000 in Tanzania, though that figure appears to combine a future projection with a current count rather than measuring the same thing twice. Even accounting for that inconsistency, EACOP has four years of real employment data and a working internship pipeline that has placed 118 graduate trainees to date. NMGP has none of this yet, because it cannot: no FID has been reached, no construction has started. Any workforce figure attached to NMGP today can only be a projection based on scale, not a measurement.
What the Arithmetic Actually Says
None of this means NMGP will follow EACOP's path. It might not. The diplomatic sluggishness that has defined NMGP since it was first proposed in 2016, ten years to reach an IGA that EACOP's equivalent stage took a fraction of the time to clear, could equally mean the harder work of actual financing and construction moves faster now that political alignment is settled. It is also possible that NMGP's diffuse, thirteen-country structure is a deliberate hedge against the kind of concentrated activist pressure that nearly stalled EACOP: a single company with four shareholders is a much easier target for a coordinated campaign than a project backed by an entire regional bloc. That is a plausible reading of the governance choice, though it remains an open question rather than a confirmed one.
What is not open to interpretation is the arithmetic. EACOP needed roughly eight years combined, from IGA-equivalent agreements to a fully financed, under-construction pipeline, to move 1,443 kilometres across two countries with four shareholders to align. NMGP is proposing five years, from this month's signing to first gas in 2031, to move 6,900 kilometres across thirteen jurisdictions with no shareholders yet identified. That gap between demonstrated pace and proposed pace is the single most important number in this story, and it is the one that will determine whether 2031 holds.