By Fred Akanni, in Lagos
The International Finance Corporation has signed a $339Million (or EUR 303Million) financing package for a proposed gas fired power project in Côte d’Ivoire.
The total cost of the project is $452Million (EUR 404Million), so the IFC intervention is financing 75% of the cost.
Which means that the Financial close and, Final Investment Decision are imminent.
The Atinkou Power Plant, to be located in scenic Jacqueville, a coastal resort town in the south of the country, consists of a 20-year concession to develop and operate a 390MW natural gas-fired power plant. The location is about 40 kilometers west of Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire’s throbbing first city.
With combined-cycle turbine technology, the plant is expected to substantially reduce Côte d’Ivoire’s generation costs and GHG emissions, in part, through the displacement of older generation units. The sponsor of the project is the Eranove Group, an industrial group which also owns and operates the 544 MW CIPREL project, the largest power plant in the country.
As Lead Arranger and Global Coordinator, IFC arranged the full debt financing package of $339Million, which, beyond IFC, was provided by the African Development Bank (AfDB), Netherlands Development Finance Company (FMO), Germany’s Deutsche Investitions- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft (DEG), the Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund, which is part of the Private Infrastructure Development Group, and the OPEC Fund for International Development (OPEC Fund). In addition to mobilizing the debt, IFC is providing, as part of the debt package, a $102Million (EUR 91Million) loan for its own account, as well as interest rate swaps to hedge the project’s interest rate risk.
