IVORY Coast exported 1,600 gigawatt hours (GWh) of power to neighbouring countries in 2016, about twice what it exported the year before, a senior industry official said.

Total output was 10,076 GWh in 2016, up from 8,618 GWh the previous year, said Ibrahima Diaby, General Director of state oil company Petroci during the sector's annual assessment.

"This is in line with our ambition of being the top energy market in West Africa," Diaby said.

He said output from the Societe Ivoirienne de Raffinage (SIR) refinery reached 2,901,019 tonnes of refined oil products from January through November 2016.
 
He said 1,748,675 tonnes were sold domestically with 1,097,220 tonnes exported.

Ivory Coast, the world's top cocoa grower and the economic powerhouse of Francophone West Africa, supplies electricity to Ghana, Burkina Faso, Togo, Mali, Benin, and Liberia.

It plans to build connections to Sierra Leone and Guinea in the next three years.

With domestic demand rising, the government aims to double its total electricity output to 4,000 megawatts (MW) by 2020 and announced last month that it would build two new 350 MW coal-fuelled power stations.