Gas, Ghosts, and the Art of Surviving-long-enough-to-win in a Katanomic Market
On 12 March 2026, the President of Ghana stood on the edge of a South Korean shipyard and commissioned a Nigerian vessel. Pan-Africanism notwithstanding, this is not a regular occurrence, I assure you.
The HD Hyundai Heavy Industries yard in Ulsan – one of the great industrial cathedrals of the modern world, a place where ships of oceanic ambition are launched with the casualness of buses into a depot – was the unlikely setting for a moment that compressed eleven years of West African energy history into a single photograph.
There was John Dramani Mahama, resplendent in presidential purpose, christening the MT Asharami Ghana, a 40,000-cubic-metre liquefied petroleum gas carrier owned by the Sahara Group of Nigeria. Around him stood three executive directors of Sahara. The vessel’s managing director, Yaa Serwaa Alifo, a Ghanaian woman who had fought with considerable tenacity to dedicate a ship of this magnitude solely to the Ghana market and its landlocked neighbours. And somewhere in the layered symbolism of the occasion – the Korean yard, the Nigerian company, the Ghanaian president, the ship named after the country it will serve – sat eleven years of deals signed, arbitrations won, contracts abandoned, Russian oligarchs who came and quietly vanished, and a £350 million LNG terminal that has never, as of this writing, received a single commercial cargo.
This is the story of Ghana’s encounter with liquefied natural gas and its more tractable cousin, liquefied petroleum gas. It is also, at a deeper level, a story about what it takes to build a business in a country where policy and politics speak entirely different languages, where the gap between a minister’s signature and a project’s completion is measured in units other than months, such as “governments”, and where the most reliable infrastructure an energy company can build is neither a pipeline nor a terminal, but a relationship.
The framework that best illuminates all of this has a name: katanomics. Derived from the Greek kata (fracture) and nomos (governance), the concept describes what happens when democracy’s outer garments – vibrant elections, loud parliaments, a media sector that never sleeps – drape themselves over institutional bodies that are not actually learning.
In a well-functioning polity, politics aggregates social demands and policy disaggregates them into executable technical choices. In a katanomic system, that transmission breaks down. The policy process degenerates into improvisation wearing the clothes of planning. Bold promises arrive regularly and expire quietly. The architecture of reform is brittle. What is resilient is the cast of characters who understand how to navigate the wreckage.
Ghana is, by all standard metrics, a democratic success story. Peaceful transfers of power, a freewheeling press, competitive elections. Yet against the canvas those same uplifting metrics have crafted are arrayed energy projects that are announced with fanfare, quietly restructured, announced again with new partners and new names, and then restructured again. The Tema LNG terminal is the masterclass in this dynamic.
It has been, depending on which press release you consult, “about to be commissioned” since 2016. Eight years of scheduled commissioning dates, each confidently made and confidently missed. The Floating Regasification Unit arrived in January 2021. The storage vessel followed. The physical infrastructure has been sitting in Tema port for years. But as of March 2026, the terminal has not received a commercial cargo. It exists in a condition that one energy analyst described, with appropriate clinical precision, as “a coma” – physically built, commercially paralysed.
To understand how we got here, you have to go back to 2015 and a word that still produces a visible wince from most Ghanaians who lived through that period: dumsor.
The word is Twi, and it means, with rather beautiful directness, “off-on”. It marks the rolling power cuts that blanketed Ghana for much of 2014 and 2015. At its worst, the blackouts ran on a ten-hours-off, twelve-hours-on schedule. Factories operated at reduced capacity. Hospitals were hooked to generators. Ice cream shops, beauty salons, small tailors with their electric sewing machines – the entire texture of urban economic life – contracted around a crisis that was fundamentally a gas supply problem. A good chunk of Ghana’s power plants ran best on gas. The gas was supposed to come from Nigeria via the West African Gas Pipeline. The pipeline delivered intermittently. And so the lights went off.
Into this particular darkness walked West Africa Gas Limited – WAGL – a joint venture incorporated in 2013 between NNPC LNG Ltd, the Nigerian national oil company’s subsidiary holding 60 per cent, and Ocean Bed Trading, a Sahara Group entity, holding 40 per cent. WAGL was not a competitive tender winner in the conventional sense. Ghana approached them. The Mahama government, under severe electoral pressure and facing a power crisis that had become a genuine political liability, was in the market for anyone who could promise gas. WAGL moved with impressive speed. By October 2015, a Gas Supply Agreement was signed for LNG delivery at the port of Tema over five years. By November 2015, Golar LNG was announcing a new-build Floating Storage and Regasification Unit, the Golar Tundra, scheduled to arrive in time for a Q2 2016 start.
WAGL’s managing director at the time, Umar Ajiya, who would later rise to become NNPC’s Chief Financial Officer, announced that the joint venture was proud to be part of a project that “signposts immense prospect for economic growth.” This, he declared, was “the first of its kind in Sub-Saharan Africa.” There was genuine ambition in those words, and it was not misplaced. WAGL was hardly a shell company or a letter-of-intent collector. It came flush with Nigerian state oil money and brought Sahara’s considerable operational experience to what was, on paper, an attractive proposition: a country in crisis, eager to sign, with a functioning port at Tema and a power sector starved of gas.
What followed is, as a demonstration of katanomic dysfunction, almost too perfect in form and substance. The Ministry of Power failed to open a letter of credit despite it being very clear from the outset that an LC was practically the only mechanism through which WAGL could have raised the financing it needed. A raft of other steps that should have taken days took months despite copious amounts of correspondence.
When WAGL rushed to sign the deal, it had hoped to supplant an older deal by Quantum, which had been in the woodworks since 2013. Suddenly that deal blossomed. On 1 December 2016, the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation entered into a 20-year contract with Höegh LNG for gas supply at Tema – the Quantum Power project, a $550 million undertaking that the outgoing Mahama government formalised as one of its final acts, apparently without notifying WAGL that they were being replaced. Within days of that signing, Golar commenced arbitration against WAGL for non-payment of hire. The following July, the EPC contractor issued a Notice of Termination for failure to make payment. WAGL was being sued by its own sub-contractors because Ghana had not paid, while Ghana had simultaneously walked out of the deal by signing with a competitor.
The London Court of International Arbitration ruled in January 2021. WAGL was awarded $68.5 million. Ghana paid the legal and arbitration costs. The Tribunal concluded, with the measured language that arbitral panels favour, that it was “necessary for WAGL to commence this arbitration to recover the sums awarded.” Ghana’s counterclaim – that WAGL had failed to use reasonable endeavours – was dismissed entirely.
Give that number its proper company: another power project, GPGC, had earlier won $170 million from Ghana without generating a single kilowatt. Together, those two arbitration awards cost the Ghanaian taxpayer $238.5 million for energy projects that produced neither gas nor electricity. This is katanomics in its rawest expression: the political appetite to sign deals wildly outstripping the institutional capacity to honour them. And the resulting legal bill sent to citizens who had no say in any of it.
And yet. Here is John Mahama in Ulsan in March 2026, commending the same WAGL – now rebranded WAGL Energy (softer name, the arbitration episode politely archived) for its “leadership, technical expertise, and strategic foresight.” The entity that won a $68.5 million arbitration against Ghana has returned, five years later, as a state-endorsed partner. Same ownership structure (NNPC plus Sahara), same geographic target (Tema), same political counterpart. What changed was the product.
LNG, with its enormous infrastructure requirements and sovereign take-or-pay obligations, is no longer in play here. LPG – cooking gas, manageable vessels, a market with genuine household demand – has become the new vehicle.
This pivot from LNG to LPG is a vital arc in this story. It reflects something genuinely serious about doing business in a katanomic environment. LNG import projects, as Ghana’s decade of experience demonstrates with painful clarity, require sovereign offtake guarantees, mandatory state-company buyers, large floating storage infrastructure, and debt financing that leaves governments exposed to enormous contingent liabilities. They are, almost by definition, government-to-government structures, which means every procurement decision becomes a political decision, every renegotiation a cabinet-level event, and every delay another opportunity for a new administration to discover that the contracts signed by the last one are commercially inconvenient. Even more frighteningly, it requires policy to sync with politics, the one thing the Katanomic commandment has proscribed!
LPG operates on a fundamentally different logic. The state’s role is remote-regulatory rather than commercial. It does not have to promise to buy the gas at a fixed price and resell it at a loss, which is precisely what has made the Tema LNG terminal an accounting catastrophe. GNPC contracted gas from the terminal at over $13 per MMBtu while being required by regulation at key material moments to sell it at $5.99. Every cubic metre of gas imported would have generated a loss before it was used.
Shell eventually signed a deferral amendment that bought time, but it did not solve the structural mismatch. The terminal’s commercial stasis is a direct product of a katanomic system. There is no mechanism to go back and make things coherent, because that would require sustained technical engagement from a policy community perpetually overwhelmed by the noise of political accountability.
LPG, by contrast, is sold into an open, low-policy, market. Households, restaurants, even some mines buy it. The supplier does not need the state for much, except maybe to leave fantastical ideas like “cylinder recirculation” in the limbo in which it has been stuck for a while.
Ghana currently has about 30 per cent household LPG penetration and a 2030 target of 50 per cent. Capitalism could probably fill it despite policy inertia.
Hence why the International Finance Corporation’s decision to finance Sahara’s multi-country LPG terminal network – including Tema. The 2015 LNG deal had no such multilateral anchor. If the World Bank Group continues to stay behind the 2026 LPG deal, that too should make it substantially harder to cancel, signalling governance standards to other funders, and giving Sahara regulatory cover that no purely private LNG project ever achieved in Ghana. Pure and simple facts.
The Sahara trajectory, viewed across the full eleven-year arc, is a case study in adaptive strategy. The company did not bet on policy coherence. It did not make an investment that required a rational projection of the government’s trajectory over five years. It made a modular commitment – a Gas Supply Agreement with a specific government during a specific crisis – tested what the environment could bear, took its losses through arbitration when the environment proved it could not bear very much, preserved the relationship with the political orbit that mattered most, reconfigured its product offering, secured multilateral cover, and returned. The MT Asharami Ghana is obviously not the beginning of Sahara’s Ghana story. It is yet another chapter in a three-decade adaptive strategy tale.
NNPC’s persistence, despite the many challenges with the West Africa Gas Pipeline that it helms, tells the same story. In a katanomic market, the most critical factor is remaining present and becoming irreplaceable across the full cycle of deals, collapses, arbitrations, and rebirths.
The contrast with Helios Investment Partners is instructive, and in some ways more sobering. Helios is an Africa-focused private equity firm established in 2004 managing over $3 billion in capital commitments. It came to Ghana’s LNG story through the Quantum Power framework. The original Quantum Power project, linked to the Idan Ofer-affiliated Quantum Pacific Group, had secured heads of terms with GNPC in early 2016 for a $550 million offshore FSRU project. When Golar and Höegh both withdrew over payment delays and that design became undeliverable, Helios stepped in with a restructured, cheaper, inshore concept. They established the Tema LNG Terminal Company in November 2017, brought in Chinese contractors – China Harbour Engineering for onshore works and Jiangnan Shipyard for the floating regasification unit – and secured financing from the Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund. They then brought Shell in as supplier, and reached financial close in November 2020. By any measure, that is impressive deal-making under difficult conditions.
The problem was the economics on the other side of the contract. The problem was Ghana. Helios’s fund model depends on exits. A fund that set out investing in large-scale infrastructure projects requiring a relatively predictable regulatory environment found itself holding an asset that is physically complete and commercially inert. The firm’s 2024 annual report is quietly devastating on this point, recording a “significant drop in fair value” of “a private company specialising in the transportation, storage, and processing of liquefied natural gas.” Helios has since reframed the terminal as a regional hub and has been touting re-export potential, bunkering, and serving a broader sub-regional market rather than purely domestic demand. A rational pivot, but in katanomic West Africa, it merely compounds its policy bets, a dangerous approach.
The rapid ascent that private equity optimism projected has been blunted. Helios continues to navigate across the continent, hoping to find the scaling escalator that the Ghana LNG position was supposed to represent.
And the Russians? Well, in May 2018, at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, GNPC signed a deal with Rosneft for 1.7 million tonnes per year of LNG over twelve years. By July 2019, the Rosneft agreement had been silently replaced by a new deal with Helios and Chinese contractors. No public explanation was offered. In a country with functioning policy accountability, a sovereign government signing and then abandoning a 12-year gas deal with a Russian state energy company would have generated sustained parliamentary scrutiny. In a katanomic system, it generated a footnote. But the key business insight is that in such a system, players under-commit so that they can walk away whenever.
We have suggested that commercial LPG is safer because it demands a far modest policy rails. True, but that doesn’t mean that there is no policy interface at all. In fact, the dabbling of the political class is what provides the essential contrasts that cement the katanomic diagnosis.
Enter a project that most public commentary has barely noticed: the second gas processing plant, GPP2. Ghana’s existing plant at Atuabo processes around 120 million standard cubic feet per day of domestic gas and produces LPG as a by-product. A second plant – at capacity, 150 to 200 MMscfd – would, on paper, dramatically increase domestic LPG production, eroding the import dependency that underpins the commercial rationale for the MT Asharami Ghana. Does that mean that WAGL isn’t home dry like we suggested in previous paragraphs? Well, wait for it.
The previous NPP government signed a $700 million project implementation agreement for GPP2 in February 2023. It went nowhere. The incoming Mahama government declared that its predecessor had failed to build the critical infrastructure, inaugurated an implementation committee in May 2025, submitted a technical report to Cabinet, and as of March 2026 was awaiting Cabinet approval, with no contractor appointed and no financial close in sight. One way to interpret that is to apply symmetry: not betting on policy coherence sometimes means betting on policy incoherence. WAGL and Sahara are probably safe in assuming that import dependency won’t end in Ghana anytime soon. Worst case scenario, there would be offtake contracts to corner once GPP2 is online.
Where the competition is more credible is in connection with a Trafigura-backed 135 MMscfd gas conditioning plant at Prestea, targeting commissioning by August 2026, which will produce domestic LPG as a by-product and represent the first significant new domestic supply source outside state-owned Ghana Gas’ Atuabo facility. (By the way, Trafigura is the above-mentioned company that also got an arbitral award exceeding $170 million from Ghana). If both GPP2 and the Prestea plant deliver on schedule – which GPP2, at minimum, almost certainly will not – the market into which the Asharami Ghana is sailing shifts considerably.
Mahama’s commissioning of the vessel in Ulsan was thus very likely a calculated hedge by a president who understands, perhaps intuitively, the katanomic environment he governs better than most of his advisors. If GPP2 stays in political limbo, as it likely will, Sahara’s LPG import infrastructure becomes the visible symbol of a successful national gas policy. Easier to hoist political banners rather than fix long-running policy dysfunction.
What does any of this teach the business strategist willing to work in markets like Ghana? Pretty base: in a katanomic environment, the companies that survive and eventually prosper are those that understand the difference between policy and the will of the politician currently in power, that make modular rather than monolithic commitments, that absorb losses through legitimate legal mechanisms rather than political counter-pressure, and that retain the institutional patience to return when the cycle turns.
Sahara and WAGL lost $68.5 million, recovered it through arbitration, and used the intervening years to redesign their Ghana proposition entirely. They did not bet on policy coherence because no sensible actor bets on policy coherence in a katanomic system. They bet on their own adaptability, on the relational capital they had built across two cycles of a political journey, and on a product that is structurally less dependent on the state than the product they originally tried to sell.
The lesson for Helios is the mirror image. Their moves were simply not calibrated for a system in which the state can sign a 20-year take-or-pay agreement and then structure the regulatory environment in a way that makes honouring that agreement a financial impossibility. That more or less is the story of Tema LNG against the backdrop of katanomic governance.
There is something almost alchemical about the arc from that 2015 Gas Supply Agreement to the sunlit ceremony in Ulsan: the base metal of an arbitration award transmuted, through a decade of patient repositioning, into the gold of a presidential commissioning.
The ship named after Ghana will carry gas to Ghana, very likely via Tema. It will do so regardless of who signs the next gas master plan, who chairs the next implementation committee, or which government announces the next iteration of the second gas processing plant. We should not belittle the achievement. In a market where the standard sequence runs access, deal, collapse, arbitration, re-entry, and back again, simply arriving at the point where your ship is in the water and your storage terminal is under construction represents a form of victory that those who have not tried to do business in these environments will consistently underestimate.
The katanomic environment does not reward the visionary who bets everything on a rational policy trajectory. It rewards the patient, the modular, the relationally intelligent. It vindicates those who can survive the chaos long enough to catch the next escalator up, wherever it happens to appear.
The lights went off in 2015. Then the gas deals collapsed. Then the lawyers got rich. Then the Rosneft men came to town and left again. Then the Chinese built a terminal that has not yet received a cargo. And then, on a cold March morning in a South Korean shipyard, a Ghanaian president broke a bottle against the hull of a Nigerian ship and called it a milestone in Ghanaian energy security.
He was, in his way, correct. The milestone is just not quite the one the ceremony’s choreography implied. It is a monument to survival, and in West Africa’s business landscape, survival is the prerequisite to everything else.