The Deputy Managing Director (Deep Water) TOTAL Nigeria, Mr Musa Ahmadu-Kida has said that with the right policies, local content in Nigeria would flourish and drive the oil and gas industry. Ahmadu-Kida said this while delivering a keynote address at a seminar on Nigeria’s Local Content Law at the annual Nigeria Oil and Gas strategic conference and international exhibition in Abuja. He said that the Total deepwater project: Egina is the deepest offshore development executed so far in Nigeria.
According to him, it is being executed in water depths of more than 1,500 meters and the project is designed to produce 200,000 barrels per day of oil at peak. He said it was three years after the Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development (NOGICD) Act became law that the final decision to develop Egina began in 2013. “It was against the backdrop of this new approach to Nigerian Content that Total took the Final Investment Decision to develop Egina in 2013, the result is that Egina became a test case for the NOGICD Act. Egina is the latest of Total’sdeep-water developments, and the third project of its kind developed by Total in Nigeria, after Akpo and Usan.
These projects have brought progressive increase in levels of Nigerian Content and this is well illustrated by the percentage of total project workload performed in Nigeria: from 44 per cent for Usan, Total recorded 60 per cent for Akpo and now 77 per cent will be achieved for Egina. In the coming weeks, the FPSO will sail away to Egina field, which is located in OML130, approximately 150km offshore Port Harcourt. In addition to the oil, the Egina field will produce gas. Nigerian Content in the Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry, through careful legislation and government policies could also have great impact in other sectors of the economy, including Information and Communication Technology/Telecommunication, Agriculture, Power and others.’’
He added that when it began fully operational, the project would account for 10 per cent of Nigeria’s total oil production. “The 3.3 billion dollars Floating Production Storage Offloading (FPSO) unit for the 200,000 barrels per day (bpd) capacity Egina Deepwater oilfield, which arrived in Nigeria in January this year from South Korea, will be in the Egina oilfield soon. “It was constructed under the FPSO package contract by SHI-MCI, within Lagos deep offshore logistics base on LADOL Island. Today, the Egina project is proudly the first to record the fabrication and integration of FPSO topsides in Nigeria. Six of the 18 topside modules were fabricated and integrated at the SHI-MCI facility at LADOL. The Egina FPSO arrived from Korea in the last week of January for the integration of the locally fabricated modules and this integration was successfully completed in May without incident,’’ Ahmadu-Kida said.
He advised that to deepen adherence to the country’s local content policy, both government and operators would need to cooperate to ensure that a stable business environment was sustained for the industry. According to him, operators have in the past three years of oil price slump, cut down their costs on deepwater projects to ensure they stayed in business. In his opening address, Mr Simbi Wabote, the Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Content Development Monitoring Board (NCDMB), gave a progress report on the Board. Wabote said of the 10 strategies he outlined for increased national capacity over a five-year period, he had engaged Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF), and the Petroleum Training Institute (PTI) to streamline areas of intervention in Human Capacity building.
“We have engaged stakeholders on in-country capacity utilisation. We fast-tracked the establishment of five oil and gas parks and are looking at the establishment of similar parks in other geo-political zones of the country. We held the maiden edition of the Nigerian Content Opportunities Fair in Uyo and we have published the compendium of opportunities in the oil and gas industries as promised. We promised to hold the Research and Development Fair, this was done in Sept. 2017, in Lagos with a very resounding success. Some of the actions from the Fair are being implemented as I speak.
Strategy six was on streamlining the contracting cycle to six months. On this, we have signed Service Level Agreements with Nigeria LNG Limited, and OPTS. The third SLA is being jointly developed with Independent Petroleum Producers Group.’’ Wabote said the board would take measures to ensure that operators who participated in its 200 million dollars local content fund do not end up abusing the process and subsequently deflating the fund. He warned that the board would hand over any operator who failed to remit what was due to it as requested by the local content law to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC). He noted that the board was undertaking a forensic audit of the remittances and had engaged the country’s judicial sector on how the local content law works with regards to such remittances to it.
