France’s Total Set To Approve New Oil Project Offshore Nigeria

France’s Total will officially endorse a decision to proceed with the development of a new project offshore Nigeria, the Ikike project, Patrick Pouyanné, the chief executive of the oil and gas supermajor, said on Monday.

“There is a huge potential in Nigeria, it is probably the most prolific country in west Africa in terms of oil and gas and it is time to launch new projects and we are working on many of them,” Reuters quoted Pouyanné as telling reporters on the sidelines of a meeting of French and Nigerian companies in Paris today.

Pouyanné’s comments come a few weeks after Total started up oil production from Nigeria’s ultra-deepwater oil field Egina, which is expected to produce 200,000 bpd at peak output.

The French supermajor began production at the Egina oil field on December 29, Total said early this month. The Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) unit that was used to develop the ultra-deep Egina oil field is the largest such unit that Total has ever built, according to the French group. Total noted that the plateau production at the ultra-deepwater field would be 200,000 barrels of oil per day, which would account for some 10 percent of Nigeria’s oil production.

Related: French Total To Enter Saudi Downstream Business

Total is set to begin exports from the new ultra-deep Egina oil field offshore Nigeria as early as in February 2019, at an initial rate of just over 100,000 bpd, Bloomberg reported in December, quoting a copy of a loading program for the new grade it had seen.

In Nigeria, Total operates five production licenses (OML) on the 34 leases in which it has interests, including two exploration licenses. In addition to production license OML 130 where the Akpo, Egina, and Preowei fields were discovered, Total operates other offshore assets such as OML 99 with a 40-percent stake, where the Ikike discovery is located, OML 100 with 40 percent, and OML 102 with 40 percent, where the Ofon 2 project was completed in 2016.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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