When we speak of the destruction wrought by galamsey, we speak of the rivers such as the Pra, the Ankobra, the Birim, the Offin turned the colour of clay. We speak of ruined cocoa farms, of forest reserves eaten away, of water so turbid our own treatment plants can no longer clean it. All of this is true, and all of it is urgent. But there is a casualty of illegal mining that we have not yet named, one buried quite literally beneath our feet: the network of high-pressure gas pipelines that is meant to power the very regions where galamsey now thrives.
I write as a mechanical engineer, and as an assistant manager in the Community Relations Department of the Ghana National Gas Limited Company (Ghana Gas). My work sits at the meeting point between this infrastructure and the communities that live alongside it and from that vantage point, I want to raise an alarm about a danger that has, so far, escaped the national conversation.
A collision course we can still see coming
Consider the geography. Ghana’s gas backbone begins at the Atuabo processing plant in the Western Region, where our offshore gas is conditioned before it is sent out. From there, buried steel transmission lines run east along the coast to the Aboadze thermal enclave near Takoradi, while the wider network tied at one end to the West African Gas Pipeline that imports supply from Nigeria now reaches far inland, climbing north through Prestea and on toward Kumasi and the industrial middle belt. In total, this is well over four hundred kilometres of buried pipe carrying gas at high pressure across the country.
Now overlay a second map: the map of galamsey. It covers almost exactly the same ground. The Western Region, Ashanti, the Central belt, the corridors our pipelines traverse are the same corridors where illegal miners are tearing open the earth. In the west, the lines run through the Ankobra and Pra basins that galamsey has already ravaged. Inland, sections of the network cross rivers such as the Offin where, only weeks ago, task forces were destroying dozens of chanfang machines mining directly in the riverbed.
A buried gas line and an army of unregulated excavators are converging on the same few metres of ground, and almost no one is talking about it. We have not yet had a catastrophe. But the absence of a disaster is not the presence of safety. It is a countdown.
How illegal mining attacks a pipeline
Galamsey threatens a buried gas line through several distinct mechanisms, and it helps to separate them, because they are not the same problem.
The first and most violent is a direct mechanical strike. Today’s galamsey is not the pickaxe-and-pan operation of old; it is mechanised, using excavators that dig deep, unpermitted pits with no knowledge whatsoever of what lies beneath. Third-party excavation is the single most catastrophic cause of pipeline failure anywhere in the world. An operator who does not know the line is there, and has no reason to call before he digs, is the nightmare scenario for any pipeline engineer.
The second is exposure. Galamsey strips away the overburden, the protective depth of soil, that shields a buried pipe and it does its worst work in and along rivers. Where a line crosses a watercourse that is being dredged, diverted and dammed, the riverbed scours away, and a pipe designed to rest supported in the ground is left hanging, exposed to the current and to bending stress it was never meant to carry.
The third is the most insidious, and the one that is entirely invisible until it is too late: corrosion. Galamsey does not merely muddy our water; it poisons the ground. Mercury, cyanide, arsenic and acidic, heavily mineralised runoff create one of the most aggressive environments a buried steel pipeline can face. Ghana’s own water utility has recorded turbidity above 14,000 NTU in affected rivers, many times what treatment plants can handle. That same chemistry attacks pipeline coatings and overwhelms the cathodic protection systems that keep steel from rusting through. A pipe can be corroding steadily beneath a galamsey-poisoned floodplain for years, with nothing visible on the surface, until it fails.
And finally there is the right-of-way itself. A pipeline needs a clear, accessible corridor so that it can be patrolled, inspected and reached in an emergency. Galamsey pits, camps and settlements encroach on that corridor and make routine surveillance impossible and, increasingly, dangerous. When enforcement teams report armed men at mining sites, we must be honest about what that means for the technicians whose job is to walk the line.
Why this is a national energy question
Here lies the bitter irony. Ghana does not have gas to spare. Our domestic production already falls short of peak demand, which is why we still import gas through the West African Gas Pipeline to keep the lights on. Every kilometre of domestic pipeline therefore carries energy we cannot afford to lose.
And the gas flowing through these inland lines feeds the power plants bringing reliable electricity to Ashanti and the central belt, the very electricity that could underwrite factories, jobs and a future that does not depend on scraping gold out of a poisoned river. Galamsey is not only stealing our water today; it is quietly threatening the infrastructure meant to power our escape from it tomorrow.
A polluted river is a slow tragedy. A high-pressure gas pipeline rupture near a mining settlement is an instant one. This is no longer only an environmental story or an agricultural one. It is an energy security and public safety story, and it deserves to be treated as such.
What must be done
We do not need to wait for the first explosion to act. A serious response would begin by formally mapping where our pipeline rights-of-way intersect galamsey hotspots, so that the highest-risk sections are known and watched. It would bring pipeline operators into the intelligence-sharing already happening through NAIMOS and the Blue Water Guards, so that illegal activity along a line is flagged the moment it appears, not months later. It would treat pipeline corridors as protected security zones, with the same seriousness we extend to any other piece of critical national infrastructure.
On the technical side, operators must intensify corrosion monitoring and integrity assessment along mining-affected stretches specifically, rather than relying on network-wide averages that hide localised danger. And none of this works without the communities themselves. This is the part I see most clearly in my own work: the people who farm, live and travel along these corridors are the infrastructure’s first and best defenders. They must be engaged not as obstacles to be moved, but as partners who understand what lies beneath their land and why it matters for their own safety as much as for the nation’s power supply.
Galamsey has already cost us our rivers, our forests and, in too many communities, our health. Let us not add to that list the steel arteries carrying the energy that is supposed to build our future. The menace is not only what we can see churning in our rivers. Some of it lies buried, silent, one careless excavator bucket away from a disaster we will not be able to undo.
Ing. Emmanuel Yaw Okai is a mechanical engineer and Assistant Manager of the Community Relations Department at the Ghana National Gas Company (Ghana Gas). The views expressed in this article are his own.
By Ing. Emmanuel Yaw Okai
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