Nigeria’s hope of increasing oil production will soon be a reality as Egina oil field, the flagship of Total Exploration and Production, is set to come on stream in 2018.The floating production storage offloading, FPSO, project is expected to add 200,000 barrels per day, bpd to Nigeria’s output. This is coming as the Total Group said it has invested about $10 billion in the Nigeria oil sector in the last five years.
Speaking at the Nigeria Annual International Conference and Exhibition of the Society for Petroleum Engineers, SPE, 2017, in Lagos recently, the Managing Director/Chief Executive, Total Upstream Companies in Nigeria, Nicolas Terraz, who was represented by the Executive Director, Corporate Affairs and Services, Abiodun Afolabi, said that the FPSO should be in Nigeria in the fourth quarter of 2017.
“The Egina FPSO is planned to sail away from Samsung Heavy Industries yard in South Korea for Nigeria by third quarter, Q3, 2017 and should be in Nigeria Q4, 2017 where integration of six locally fabricated topside modules will be integrated on the FPSO at SHI-MCI Yard (LADOL) before final sail away to Egina site, deep offshore Nigeria. All is on course for first oil around Q4, 2018”, he said.
He explained that beyond the expected 200,000 bpd addition, Total is committed to the development of local industry capacity. According to him, the company boasts of 24 million man-hours of work done in-country representing 77 percent of the work load for the project and equivalent to a workforce of 3,000 persons on average in the last five years.
Total has achieved fabrication of approximately 60,000 tons of equipment in various yards in-country, including specialized equipment like pressure vessels, flare tower, helideck, living quarters structures, large FPSO structures and complex subsea structures like Subsea Manifolds.
“297,000 man-hours of work on the basic engineering for the Egina Project was performed in Lagos by three Nigerian Companies Netco/Batelitwin, Crestech and Dover, representing 94 percent of the total man-hours spent,” he said. Advocating for a home-grown solution to the volatility in the global oil industry, Terraz said, “Although the oil and gas business is a global one, we believe that the time has come for SPE, other professional bodies in the industry and all other stakeholders to look inwards for home-made solutions that will help Nigeria cushion the effects and ride the wave of ups and downs, the good times and the bad times, in an increasingly unpredictable global market.
“There is no gainsaying the fact that global market conditions might be identical but the local circumstances of nations are unique to them. And so are the solutions.” Explaining Total’s commitment to the future of Nigeria, Terraz said that the company is present along the value chain from upstream to the downstream sector where Total is a leader with close to 550 service stations across the length and breadth of Nigeria.
