The Ada-Songor Salt project is run by Electrochem Ghana Limited, a division of the McDan Group of Companies, and the Minerals Income and Investment Fund (MIIF) is considering investing GH300 million there.
The investment, which is contingent on Electrochem Ghana Ltd listing its shares on the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE), has the potential to transform a vast 41,000-acre facility into the largest salt industrial complex on the continent. According to MIIF's Chief Executive Officer Edward Nana Yaw Koranteng, this demand demonstrates the organization's dedication to promoting development and openness in the extractive sector.
According to him, the Fund is actively looking into the possibility of investing in the project. According to him, the planned GH300million investment in the Ada-Songor salt project will not only completely reshape the country's salt business but also establish new benchmarks for salt production across Africa.
The method is still being worked out; it has not been finalised. To assure the success of this game-changing deal, we are currently working with other transaction advisers and undergoing the necessary due diligence procedures, such as "know your client" (KYC), he stated.
He said that it is impossible to overestimate the significance of this prospective investment. Around 14,000 different uses exist for industrial salt, which is an incredible variety. These applications cover important industries like oil and gas, medicines, and bicarbonates, among others.
In the meantime, he hinted that the growth of a healthy industrial salt sector is ready to spark economic change by boosting homegrown businesses, lowering imports, and promoting independence.
At a stakeholder forum in Accra, the head of MIIF told B&FT about this. The forum's subject was "MIIF as a lever for Ghanaian development, investing responsibly, transparently, and accountablely to secure Ghana's future prosperity."
The Minerals Income Investment Fund Act, Act 978, established MIIF as the state's sovereign fund for minerals. It is meant to act as a tactical lever to maximise the value generating potential of the mining industry for long-term national growth.
The Fund's duties include managing the nation's equity stake in mining firms, collecting dividends from these equity stakes, as well as collecting mineral royalties and other related income owed to the state from mining. The Fund is also responsible for managing and investing these money.
You may remember that President Nana Akufo-Addo recently cut the ribbon on the $88 million salt production factory at Ada, in the Greater Accra District, to signal the official start of construction.
According to reports, the newly built plant has the potential to make salt one of the nation's top exports to the African continent as part of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement.
When the Ada Songor Salt project is fully finished in 2026 under the AfCFTA, it is predicted to provide about US$2 billion for the economy, making it one of the primary sources of foreign money.
The project will be ramped up to around two million tonnes by 2025 from an initial production capability of one million metric tonnes of salt annually. After all phases are finished, the concession will have an overall capacity of 15 million tonnes annually.
The 15 million capacity long-term target is expected to meet the demand of the majority of African countries, with Ghana and Senegal standing out as the only nations with natural salt minerals in West Africa. Salt has been identified as a crucial commodity for food security and the industrialization of the African continent.
Daniel McKorley, the chairman of the McDan Group of Companies, had previously told the British Financial Times that, with careful planning and the appropriate financial resources, "we can easily scale-up this project to 15 million m/t per annum in five years."
"We are now adding roughly 3,000 employment as we finish off this phase one. The fact that you don't need a degree to work here is also crucial because locals in this area desperately need jobs of this nature. For a nation like Ghana, producing jobs implies that almost 98 percent of the workforce won't need a degree to work, he remarked earlier this year.
He described the project's three phases: production of salt, establishment of a world-class salt refinery, and construction of a chlor-alkali plant to meet the highest industrial demands.
