Two unit of the World Bank Group would provide another $517m to Ghana in debt and guarantees to support the $7.7b Sankofa oil and gas project developed by Italy’s ENI SpA and upstream trader Vitol Ghana, Reuters reported.

This brings to a total of $1.217b provided by the group after it initially injected $700m in the project. Already, the World Bank’s commercial lending arm, which is the International Finance Corporation (IFC), has committed a loan of $235m to Vitol Ghana, and is arranging another $65m in debt, according to CitiFM Online.

Guarantees by the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, another bank institution, will support Vitol Ghana’s commercial borrowing needs for the project and will be issued for up to 15 years. The new pledges bring the World Bank Group’s financing share of the Sankofa project to about 16%. While, ENI holds a 44.4% stake in Sankofa, Vitol holds 35.6% and Ghana National Petroleum Corporation holds a combined carried and participating interest of 20%.

Ghana first began pumping oil in 2010 at the offshore Jubilee field operated by Tullow Oil Plc, a British company that in August opened a second field called TEN. Sankofa is expected to generate about 1,000MW of power for Ghana and, combined with gas from two other new fields, could eliminate the need for Ghana to import gas from Nigeria through the West African Gas Pipeline Co.