01 March 2016, Lagos – Amidst drive towards diversification of the economy away from the oil dependency, the maritime industry is working to account for over 30 per cent of the country’s gross domestic products, GDP.
The 30 per cent mark, which was the target of the ministry of transport translates into about USD15 billion at current rebased GDP of USD510 billion.
Managing Director of Lagos Deep Off-Shore Logistics, LADOL, Dr. Amy Jadesimi, told Vanguard that its operations were already in line to achieving this, combined with the input from other operators in the sector.
She disclosed that LADOL was at present building a Floating Production Storage Off-loading, FPSO, project for Total Oil’s Egina Field worth about USD15 billion dollars with foreign partners, Samsung of South Korea, injecting about USD3.8 billion.
With this project on stream, the contracts worth over USD6.0 billion moved out of Nigeria with a corresponding foreign exchange resources flowing out would now be domiciled in the economy, creating new jobs and accretion to GDP.
According to Jadesimi, “The FPSO is now inside Nigeria, so the demand for local fabrication and engineering will increase four fold.
“This is something that is enormously important to the economy of the country and it is also strategically important to attract additional foreign and local private investment.”
The Egina FPSO, which will store about two million barrels of oil will be the first FPSO in the history of Nigeria to be integrated onshore and will also be one of the largest in the world.
According to Jadesimi; “This is a huge milestone in the industry given that every FPSO from now on can come to Nigeria and local content can finally reach beyond the 10 to 15 percent level.
“Now that we have this facility at LADOL, we will be able to achieve 50 percent local content. So not only are we creating jobs, we are domesticating activities and conserving foreign currencies.
“So giving us control of the whole value chain is changing the game. These projects are necessary to support the oil and gas industry and are also necessary to support the diversification from oil and gas.
“The facility in LADOL can be used to do any kind of steel fabrication. You can do railways, we can do pre-fabrication steel for hospitals, we can build bridges and we can also do for factories. So any type of project that you need new steel fabrication for something, you do not have to go outside the country any more. The cranes we have inside the facility are the heaviest in the whole of Africa, even if you go to South Africa they do not have what we have in Nigeria now”.
- Vanguard
