By Jonathan Ugbal; Government House Correspondent
A South Korean firm, Kingline Integrated Power Development Limited Tuesday, approached the Cross River State government for land acquisition to build a 550 MegaWatts, MW gas fired power plant in the state.
This comes on the heels of several Memorandum of Understandings and Expression of Interest from several companies to develop power infrastructure in the state from embedded generation to high scale generation and transmission systems.
“What we are proposing to do is to develop a 550 MW power plant” Sean Kim, the Chief Executive Officer told Cross River Governor, Senator Ben Ayade when he led a delegation from thd company to visit him at his office.
“We have already done some preliminary checks in Cross River State and the proposed sites meet all of the requirements which is why we are here today” said Kim who also disclosed the next phase will be the application for a generation license, initiating processes for the environmental impact assessment and preparations for the project among other necessary bureaucratic processes.
On financing, Kim said about 560 million USD will be coming in from the company and other investors which includes the World Bank and pointed out that the sum will “be sufficient to get this power plant underway”.
“We intend to to invest around 10 million dollars during the developing phase and then once we get to the financing closure, together with our investors, we plan to bring in about USD150 million in terms of equity. At the same time, we will put together a debt package of around USD400 million composed of export credit, Agency support from Korea as well as the World Bank and others” Kim explained.
Appealing for land and security, Kim described the proposed relationship as one that will be “win-win beneficial” as the state will have the opportunity as a shareholder, the value creation on the share, the dividend and tax revenues as well as create over 1,000 jobs as the local content act will be effective in the hiring of labour for the building of the plant.
In his remarks, Ayade welcomed the idea of gas fired turbines as the state’s capital city of Calabar according to him, was designed to be “The epicentre of gas gathering around the southern flank in the gas master plan”.
“You are doing the right thing, you are coming at the right time as this is the time that you also have the right incentives. The gas to power tariff is completely restructured in such a way that it will support you to buy gas to generate power. And so, I believe that with that scenario, the gas fired turbine will be a good way to go” Ayade said.
Furthermore, the Governor said the choice of Cross River to invest, was not only good but ticked all the boxes needed for business to thrive in the Niger Delta corridor considering environmental peace, social peace, topography and others.
“You don’t have to carry a policeman, you don’t need to carry law enforcement to force Cross Riverians to pay utility bills because we are educated, we are very civilized, we are very cultured because we had the earliest contact with civilization as a state” Ayade said, pointing out the reasons why Cross River remained a leading investment destination in Nigeria.