Houston, Texas | – The Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Andrew Yakubu, estimate that Total Upstream company’s Egina deep water project could attract over $15 billion foreign direct investment to Nigeria.
Total Upstream Nigeria’s $3.8 billion Egina Deepwater FPSO project.
Mr Yakubu, who gave the estimate at a dinner jointly organized in Houston, Texas by NNPC and the Petroleum Technology Association of Nigeria (PETAN) for the Nigerian business community, said the project would contribute its quota in shoring up the daily oil output as well as the national oil reserve for the country. According to him, some of the components of the project would be executed in Nigeria as part of the government’s agenda to boost Nigerian content initiative in the project.
He explained that Nigeria has gone far in harnessing crude oil in the deep water locations, adding that the technology and human capital used in previous projects by Shell, ExxonMobil, and Chevron in the development of Bonga, Agbami and Usan deep water projects, would be deployed to develop the project which is expected to boost Nigeria content initiative.
Nogtec reliably gathered that the Egina deep water oil field is located 150km off the coast of Nigeria, and is being developed by Total Upstream Nigeria (24%) in partnership with CNOOC (45%), Sapetro (15%) and Petrobras (16%). The project is the third deep offshore development of Total in Nigeria. The field is currently under development and the production is scheduled to begin by the end of 2017.
Located about 20km away from Akpo field, Egina field lies within the block Oil Mining Lease OML 130 and covers an area of around 500 square miles. It is situated at a water depth of up to 1,750m.
The field was discovered in December 2003 when the Egina-1 well was drilled. Following the discovery, the appraisal well Egina-2 was drilled in October 2004. The appraisal programme and seismic data processing resulted in the Egina-3 well drilling in September 2006, which occurred at a water depth of approximately 1,500m. Following this, Egina-4 was drilled in November 2006 and Egina-5 was drilled in January 2007.
The five wells on Egina field encountered 60 to 80m of oil in Miocene sands. The oil reserves are estimated at 550 million barrels. The light oil is rated at 28° API. The Egina field was initially planned to be developed as a subsea tieback to the Akpo floating production storage and offloading vessel (FPSO). Major discoveries in the area, however, led to the stand alone development of Egina.
Basic engineering studies of the field were begun in 2008. The development plan was approved by the Federal government in 2009.
Pre-qualification tenders were invited for the engineering, procurement, construction and supply of essential generators packages. These packages will be integrated on a FPSO unit. The FPSO development project involves the design, procurement, construction, hook-up, pre-commissioning, transportation and commissioning of the FPSO hull and topsides.
The first comprehensive front end engineering design (FEED) was completed in July 2010 and carried out by J P Kenny and MCS Kenny. Egina field infrastructure includes an FPSO unit, oil offloading terminal and various subsea production systems.
Field infrastructure will include an FPSO unit, an oil offloading terminal and subsea production systems such as risers, 52km of oil and water injection flowlines, 12 flexible jumpers, 20km of gas export pipelines, 80km of umbilicals, and subsea manifolds.
