OpeOluwani Akintayo
23 February 2018, Sweetcrude, Lagos – International oil company, Royal Dutch Shell, will approve Nigeria’s Bonga Southwest deepwater project alongside Vito in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico projects this year, SweetcrudeReports has learned.
According to the company’s head of oil and gas production, Andy Brown, in an interview on the sidelines of the IP Week conference, aside approving the one billion barrels Bonga Southwest Aparo project, it would also sign off on Vito in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico Whale discovery.
The green light for Southwest came after many years of shifts in Final Investments Decision, FID.
On Bonga South West Aparo deepwater project alone, the Nigerian government had said it was expecting one billion barrels of oil and an expenditure of over $10 billion.
Shell Nigeria Exploration and Production Company, SNEPCo, is the major title-holder of the project.
Now that a final investment decision is targeted for 2018, first oil flow from the project is expected in 2021 or 2022.
The company plans to build a Floating Production Storage and Offloading, FPSO, vessel, aimed at exploiting about 800 million barrels of recoverable oil from an oil-in-place resource of about 3.2 billion barrels.
The bulk of Bonga South West’s resources are located in OML 118 but it also extends into OMLs 132 and 140, operated by U.S. supermajor Chevron, where it is called Aparo and the remaining partners in the field are US giant ExxonMobil, France’s Total, Italy’s Eni and South Africa’s Sasol Petroleum.
