Gas, Ghosts, and the Art of Surviving-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 gas Nigerian vessel. Pan-Africanism notwithstanding, this is not a regular occurrence, I assure you.
The HD Hyundai Heavy Industries yard in Ulsan 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. 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 “government terms”, and where the most reliable infrastructure an energy company can build is neither a pipeline nor a terminal, but a relationship.
Some colleagues and I have given this type of situation 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. The policy process degenerates into improvisation wearing the clothes of planning. Bold promises arrive regularly and expire quietly. What is resilient is the cast of characters who understand how to navigate the wreckage.
Ghana’s Tema LNG terminal is a true katanomic masterclass. It has been “about to be commissioned” since 2016. The Floating Regasification Unit arrived in January 2021. The storage vessel followed. But as of March 2026, the terminal has not received a commercial cargo. One energy analyst described its condition with appropriate clinical precision as “a coma” – physical alive, commercially paralysed.
To understand how we got here, you have to go back to 2015 and a word that still make Ghanaians wince: dumsor. In Twi, it means “off-on”. At its worst, the blackouts ran on a ten-hours-off, twelve-hours-on schedule. 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. And so the lights went off.
Into this particular darkness walked West Africa Gas Limited – WAGL – a joint venture between NNPC LNG Ltd, the Nigerian national oil company’s subsidiary holding 60 per cent, and Ocean Bed Trading, a Sahara Group entity, at 40 per cent. The Mahama government, under severe electoral pressure, was in the market for anyone who could promise gas. WAGL moved quickly. By October 2015, a Gas Supply Agreement was signed for LNG delivery at Tema over five years. By November 2015, Golar LNG was announcing a new-build FSRU scheduled for a Q2 2016 start.
What followed is, as a demonstration of katanomic dysfunction, almost too perfect. The Ministry of Power failed to open a letter of credit – practically the only mechanism through which WAGL could raise financing. Then a competing deal that had been quietly incubating since 2013 suddenly blossomed. On 1 December 2016, GNPC entered into a 20-year contract with Höegh LNG for the Quantum Power project, apparently without notifying WAGL they were being replaced. Within days, Golar commenced arbitration. 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 and WAGL was awarded $68.5 million. Ghana’s counterclaim 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, $238.5 million in taxpayer losses for 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, with 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, same geographic target, same political counterparts. What changed was the product. LNG, with its enormous infrastructure requirements and sovereign take-or-pay obligations, is no longer in play. LPG – cooking gas, manageable vessels, genuine household demand – has become the new vehicle.
LNG import projects require sovereign offtake guarantees and government-to-government architecture, meaning every procurement decision becomes a political decision. Even more frighteningly, LNG requires policy to sync with politics – the one thing the katanomic commandment has proscribed. GNPC contracted gas from the Tema terminal at over $13 per MMBtu while being required by regulation at key material moments to sell it at $5.99. Every cubic metre imported would have generated a loss before it was used. Talk of incoherence!
LPG operates on a fundamentally different logic. The state’s role is remote-regulatory rather than commercial. Households and industries buy it without the state needing to guarantee the revenue stream. Ghana has 30 per cent household LPG penetration today and a 2030 target of 50 per cent. Capitalism could probably fill that gap despite policy inertia – which is exactly the point.
The IFC’s decision to finance Sahara’s multi-country LPG network gives this play regulatory cover and multilateral legitimacy that no purely private LNG project ever achieved in Ghana.
The contrast with Helios Investment Partners is instructive, and in some ways sobering. Helios came through the Quantum Power framework, restructured the terminal concept with Chinese contractors, brought Shell in as supplier, and reached financial close in November 2020. Impressive deal-making. But the problem was the economics on the other side of the contract. The problem was Ghana. Helios’s 2024 annual report records a “significant drop in fair value” of “a private company specialising in the transportation, storage, and processing of liquefied natural gas.” The rapid ascent that private equity optimism projected has been blunted.
As for the Russians (Rosneft), who signed a 1.7 million tonne-per-year LNG deal at St. Petersburg in May 2018 with all the geopolitical theatre that venue implies, they disappeared in 2019 without a trace. In a katanomic system, such houdinism is normal.
Hovering over the whole strategic picture is GPP2, a second gas processing plant that could, at capacity, dramatically increase domestic LPG production and erode the import dependency underpinning Sahara’s Ghana investment. The previous government signed a $700 million implementation agreement in 2023 that went nowhere. The current Mahama government declared its predecessor had failed, inaugurated an implementation committee in May 2025, and as of March 2026 awaited Cabinet approval with no contractor appointed. One way to read that is to apply symmetry: not betting on policy coherence sometimes means betting on policy incoherence. WAGL and Sahara are probably safe assuming import dependency will not end in Ghana anytime soon.
Mahama’s commissioning of the Asharami Ghana 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 than fix longstanding policy dysfunction.
There is something almost alchemical about the full arc: the base metal of an arbitration award transmuted, through a decade of patient repositioning, into the gold of a presidential commissioning. 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 – those who can survive the chaos long enough to catch the next escalator up.
The lights went off in 2015. Then the gas deals collapsed. Then the lawyers got rich. Then the Russian oligarchs 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 very key to the kingdom of success.
This is a shorter version of a longer essay you can read here.