Kribi can become Central Africa’s steel platform if infrastructure keeps pace

Main findings

1. Location fixes most of a steel mill’s non-metallic costs. Two of the three iron sources open to a Central African steelmaker, imported DRI or HBI and imported scrap, arrive by sea, and the third, Cameroonian ore, arrives at the same coast for export. A works of 1 Mtpa needs about 1.24 Mt a year of port-linked inbound cargo, and a first phase of 0.3 Mtpa about 351,000 t [S112]. The cheapest place to make steel in the region is beside a deep-water quay with dry-bulk handling (Chapter 1).
2. Kribi has the deepest quay in Cameroon and a record of filling new capacity. With 16 m at the quay, the port handled 12.7 Mt and 555,398 TEU in 2025, and container volumes rose by 82% in the year after a second terminal opened in May 2025 [S22][S28][S52]. Vessel waiting times were about two days at Kribi against about nine at Douala in 2025 [S54] (Chapter 2).
3. Dry bulk is the port’s missing link for heavy industry. Existing terminals can serve a first steel phase of a few hundred thousand tonnes a year. A cluster needs a dry-bulk berth with covered storage for iron units. The 125 Mt a year mineral terminal, agreed in a memorandum of understanding on 4 November 2025 and expected by PAK’s Director General in March 2026 to be completed within five to six years, should be designed with one [S32][S33][S03] (Chapter 2).
4. A dedicated zone company now holds the land. KPIZ S.A., created on 26 February 2026 by PAK, AGL, Arise IIP and Belmont Investments, is mandated to design, finance, develop, operate and maintain an integrated zone of about 4,000 ha, with a €795 million plan over fifteen years [S02][S04][S01] (Chapter 3).
5. Demand for land is twenty times what has been allocated. By mid-2025 investors had requested about 3,883 ha against 196 ha allocated under 48 occupation authorisations [S17]. The constraint is converting reserve into serviced, contracted plots, which requires KPIZ to publish its contractual framework and a tariff suited to heavy industry, without a levy on turnover [S11][S114]. As a prospective tenant, Cameroon Steel has an interest in these terms (Chapter 3).
6. The 225 kV link makes heavy industry possible; a second stage makes a cluster possible. The KPDC-port line and substation will provide about 100 MW from the end of 2026 and 330 to 400 MW later [S25]. The first stage can carry a first steel phase averaging about 36 MW; a 1 Mtpa works alone averages about 94 MW [S112]. On a steel-led path, the first stage is fully used by about 2032, so the second must be financed and scheduled now; neither its date nor its financing has been published (Chapter 4).
7. Firmness, power quality and price need rules, not just megawatts. Cameroon’s grid was about 90% hydro in 2025, 150 MW of industrial demand was unmet in October 2026, no regulated tariff exists above 10 MW, and arc furnaces disturb weak networks [S60][S61][S72]. A published power-quality code, a second high-voltage source and a long-term tariff structure are preconditions for a cluster (Chapter 4).
8. Water is abundant; treatment and hazardous waste are the gaps. Kribi receives about 2,836 mm of rain a year and a port-platform water plant is due in early 2027 [S79][S26]. Closed-loop cooling holds a mill’s make-up near 2 m³ per tonne, but no licensed route has been identified for the 10 to 20 kg of hazardous furnace dust produced per tonne of steel [S76][S112] (Chapter 5).
9. Kribi reaches its markets; rail would make it the region’s steel hinge. Six cities lie within about 300 km and the CEMAC region imports about US$500 million a year of iron and steel [S110][S94]. A 1 Mtpa works would generate about 245 truck movements a day if every flow went by road. Most of the inbound flow would stay inside the port domain, between quay and plant; about 110 to 120 loads a day would use the public road to Édéa, or about 55 to 60 if half the output ships by sea. That is the traffic the Édéa-Kribi road must carry until it is rebuilt and the June 2026 railway agreement becomes a funded line [S27][S41][S112] (Chapter 6).
10. A steel anchor creates a cluster. One 1 Mtpa works yields about 185,000 t a year of slag, scale and dust and needs about 37 million Nm³ of oxygen; Kribi already hosts a 1 Mt a year cement plant and a second is planned [S112][S35][S37]. Adjacency in the master plan, pipe and conveyor corridors and shared services decide whether those exchanges happen (Chapter 7).
11. Successful port-industrial zones built infrastructure ahead of demand and organised around anchors. Tanger Med, Jebel Ali, Jurong and Lekki share four traits: one authority for port and zone, utilities built ahead of or with the first tenants, anchor industries that pull suppliers in, and policy that pushes raw materials into local processing. Sohar and Pecém show steel organised at deep-water ports; Sohar also shows that where gas was not planned for industry, downstream growth stalled [S127] (Chapter 8).
12. Sequence is the strategy. A first steel phase can rely on infrastructure already under construction. A cluster needs, in order, a financed second power stage and power-quality code, a zone strategic environmental assessment that allocates the coast’s carrying capacity, a heavy-industry land framework, waste and gas services, and a dedicated bulk berth and rail (Chapters 9 and 10).