The Sahara wind blew at more than 80 kilometers per hour across the dunes of Nouakchott, and the newly erected steel groaned until it buckled like tin. Two of the seven gigantic storage tanks meant to guarantee Mauritania’s strategic fuel reserves collapsed before they had even received their roofs. The image of the metal structures twisted by a marine gust has not only exposed an engineering scandal south of the Tropic of Cancer; it has also set off alarm bells among suppliers at the Port of Las Palmas, the logistics hub and historic operating base of Addax subsidiary Oryx Energies for the mid-Atlantic.
The Mauritanian project — a 100,000-cubic-meter facility valued at between $30 million and $36 million — was put together under strained accounting conditions in September 2023. The international tender called by the Nouakchott government bundled the national fuel supply for two years and the turnkey construction of the logistics depot into a single opaque package. The contract went to Swiss giant Addax Energy, the parent company of Oryx. However, instead of entrusting the work to a contractor specializing in large oil-storage facilities, Addax subcontracted it under an EPC arrangement to South Africa-based EPCM Holdings.
Since May 2025, the African trade press had been warning about EPCM’s lack of credentials for a complex of this scale, with its track record limited to an unfinished depot in the Democratic Republic of Congo and technical advisory work. In April 2026, Mauritania’s oil minister, Mohamed Ould Khaled, himself demanded that the schedule be accelerated in response to severe accumulated delays. Four months later, the wind carried out the audit that the authorities had failed to conduct.
The Nouakchott collapse directly implicates the Canary Islands. Industry sources say that the supply operations, procurement of sheet metal and parts, and technical coordination between EPCM and Oryx for the Mauritanian megaproject have used the Port of Las Palmas as their main support and transshipment base. If independent inspections conclude that there was a design flaw, inadequate bracing or the use of lower-grade materials to cut costs, the shadow of negligence will fall not only over Addax’s Swiss offices, but also over the safety controls and logistical intermediation in the capital of Gran Canaria.
The article The Wind Exposing the Addax (Oryx) and EPCM Sham in Mauritania was first published on canarymaritime.com.
