The oil beneath the Doba basin in southern Chad had been known for years, but Chad is landlocked, and landlocked oil needs a route to market. The original consortium - Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell, and Elf Aquitaine - began negotiations in 1988, signing a 30-year concession for the Doba fields. In 1996, Chad and Cameroon signed a treaty authorizing the pipeline's construction. Shell and Elf eventually withdrew, replaced by Petronas and Chevron. The final consortium gave ExxonMobil a 40 percent stake, Petronas 35 percent, and Chevron 25 percent, with the two governments holding a combined 3 percent of the pipeline portion. The World Bank's private-sector arm, the International Finance Corporation, provided $100 million in financing. France's export credit agency COFACE and the U.S. Export-Import Bank each added $200 million more.

The World Bank agreed to back the project on one condition: that oil revenues would go toward poverty reduction. Chad passed a Revenue Management Law directing 80 percent of royalties to priority development sectors - education, health, infrastructure, rural development, and water resources. For a time, the arrangement looked like a new model for resource governance in Africa. Then the money arrived. In November 2000, the World Bank revealed that $4 million of a $25 million signing bonus from the oil companies had been spent by the Chadian government on weapons. In January 2006, President Idriss Deby unilaterally increased the portion of revenues flowing to the general fund from 15 to 30 percent. On September 5, 2008, Chad prepaid the entire $65.7 million World Bank loan from national coffers now swollen by over $1 billion a year in oil revenues - effectively buying its way out of oversight.

Opposition came from many directions. Chadian parliamentarian Ngarledjy Yorongar accused the National Assembly president of taking a bribe from Elf and was stripped of his parliamentary immunity and detained for nine months. Human rights attorney Delphine Djiraibe became one of the project's most persistent critics, documenting how revenues meant for poverty reduction were diverted to arms purchases. Her work earned the 2004 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. In August 2006, President Deby ordered Chevron and Petronas to leave the country entirely. Cameroonian NGOs including the Centre pour l'Environnement et le Developpement and RELUFA worked to document the pipeline's impact on communities along its 890-kilometer path through Cameroon, where more than 300 civil society complaints had accumulated by the time construction finished in 2003.

The pipeline terminates at a floating storage and offloading vessel anchored 11 miles off the coast of Kribi, a small Cameroonian town whose fishermen depend on the surrounding reefs. During construction, controversy erupted over damage to those coastal reefs - degradation that threatened not just underwater habitat but the livelihoods of people who had fished these waters for generations. Two oil spills followed, in January 2007 and April 2010, both at the offshore transfer site. The pipeline operator, COTCO, described both as minor. Local fishermen reported seeing oil on shore. Cameroonian NGOs documented what they called systemic failures in the oil-spill preparedness plan and a near-total lack of communication between COTCO and the communities living alongside its infrastructure.

The consortium that built the pipeline has almost entirely turned over. Chevron sold its stake to the Chadian government in 2014. ExxonMobil sold to UK-based Savannah Energy in December 2022, though Chad challenged the deal and the case went to the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris. Petronas sold its shares to Chad's state oil company in May 2023. The World Bank, whose involvement was supposed to be the project's moral guarantee, ended its participation in 2008, noting that Chad had failed to comply with key requirements. What remains is the infrastructure itself - 1,070 kilometers of steel pipe running from the Doba basin through the forests and savannas of Cameroon to the Atlantic. The oil still flows. The question the pipeline was built to answer - whether resource wealth can be transformed into human development - received an answer no one wanted.