Railway
NNPC Delivers 96 $2.8bn AKK Project Pipes By Rail To Itakpe (PHOTOS)
Nigeria made history Wednesday as the first haulage through rail left Warri on an 8-hour trip to Itakpe. This is the first time that such a feat will be recorded along this axis.
For the first since its take-off last year, the $2.8 billion Ajaokuta-Kaduna-Kano (AKK) gas pipeline project received a boost at the weekend when a Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC)-operated train delivered 96 pipes from Warri, Delta State to Itakpe in Kogi State.
The Ajaokuta–Kaduna–Kano (AKK) project is a 614km-long pipeline being developed by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to transport natural gas from southern Nigeria to central Nigeria and thereafter outside the country.
Group Managing Director of the NNPC, Mallam Mele Kyari, who expressed excitement over the development, noted that it will now cost less to deliver the materials.
A major boost in the delivery of #AKKGasProject as NRC Train finally commenced epoch-making haulage of line pipes from Warri to Itakpe.This locomotive, which began journey @ 11.05am on 8th Apr 2021, carried 96 pipes at once, an equivalent of 32 trailers on the road!#DecadeOfGas pic.twitter.com/cdTnXTLAQK
— NNPC Group (@NNPCgroup) April 9, 2021
“We congratulate our team on the arrival at 10.25 pm 8.4.2021 of AKK gas project line pipes by rail from Warri to Itakpe – less cost, faster delivery time, safer, protecting our roads and more. The infrastructure revolution is paying up,” he stated on his personal Twitter handle.
Describing it as epoch-making and a major boost, the NNPC stated that the 96 pipes carried by rail at once were equivalent to 32 trailers if the haulage was done by road.
On completion, the AKK pipeline is expected to transport about 3,500 million cubic feet (mcf) of gas a day from various gas gathering projects in southern Nigeria to be used in the north.
The rail line from Warri, passing through Itakpe, Ajaokuta and Agbor has six stations along the route and was initially built to ensure steel products and raw materials transported from the Delta Steel Company (DSC) which is now comatose.
