OpeOluwani Akintayo
24 January 2018, Sweetcrude, Lagos — The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, Total Upstream Nigeria Limited, TUPNI and her partners have announced the arrival of the Egina Floating, Production, Storage and Offloading unit, FPSO to the shores of Nigeria from South Korea.
The vessel’s journey to Nigeria started on October 31, 2017.
The Egina FPSO is the largest FPSO ever installed in Nigeria (330-metres long). It is currently berthed at the newly built 500-metre FPSO integration quayside at the SHI-MCI Yard, Ladol island, Lagos where the integration of 6 locally fabricated modules will take place over the next few months. This is a first for Nigeria and in fact for Africa.
The integration of the 6 locally fabricated topside modules at the SHI-MCI Yard before its final sail-away to the Egina field is a game changer as far as the execution of deep offshore oil & gas projects in the country is concerned. It is also a remarkable achievement in local content development in Nigeria.
Being the first project to be launched after the enactment of the Nigerian Oil & Gas Industry Content Development Act in 2010, EGINA is advancing Nigerian Content to record levels and has by far the highest quantum of local content completed for any oil & gas project in Nigeria, but also for Total’s projects worldwide.
In addition, several technological feats have been recorded by the various entities involved in the project, including: two consecutive world records for the number of drilling days expended on drilling Egina wells, set by the drilling rig, West Jupiter, with a duration of 22.7 and then 20.9 days respectively, and the successful installation by the UFR contractor (Saipem) of the four Production risers which are the heaviest risers ever installed in the company’s history.
Egina is the deepest offshore development carried out so far in Nigeria, with water depths over 1,500 meters. The EGINA FPSO has been designed for 25 years of operations and in addition to producing 200,000 barrels of oil per day (at plateau), the Egina operations will generate significant activities for local contractors, in various sectors and continue to provide avenues for the training and development of Nigerians in various domains.
The Egina field was discovered by TUPNI in 2003 within the Oil Mining Licence 130 (OML 130), some 200 kilometres south of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. The field is being developed by TUPNI in partnership with NNPC, CNOOC, SAPETRO and PETROBRAS. It will add 200,000 barrels per day to Nigeria’s oil production (approximately 10% of the country’s total oil production).
Egina is the largest investment project currently on-going in the oil and gas sector in Nigeria. The project is expected to be completed in Q4 – 2018 within the initial budget of USD$16 billion.
The Egina project is a testimony to the fact that a large deepwater project can be developed with a very high level of in-country activity, thus fulfilling the aspirations and objectives of the Federal Government of Nigeria in terms of employment generation, capacity building and industrial capability development.
