Nigeria’s deepwater operations have generated revenue exceeding $180billion following industry players’ capital investment in excess of $65billion with the potentials for growth.
The Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, Dr. Maikanti Baru, made this disclosure while delivering a paper entitled: “Deepwater Operations in Nigeria: The journey so far” at the Panel session of the Petroleum Technology Association of Nigeria (PETAN) in the ongoing golden anniversary of the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) in Houston, Texas.
According to a statement by NNPC spokesman Ndu Ughamadu, the GMD, who was represented by the Chief Operating Officer, Upstream of the NNPC, Mallam Bello Rabiu, stated that Nigeria held approximately 13billion barrels of oil, out of which about 2billion had been produced with a huge volume yet untapped.
Baru said Nigeria remained an active player relative to other regions in terms of deepwater development, stressing that the industry started with the deployment of latest technology, a stride it has continued to maintain.
“Out of the 15 Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) in Nigeria, seven have been deployed for deepwater operations. Nigeria ranks only behind Angola within the African deepwater operations in terms of FPSO deployment,” Baru said.
According to the GMD, the country had utilized each deepwater project as an avenue to upscale its unique human capital skills in different areas not limited to engineering design, project management, welding and diving.
He added that the local content contribution or services share in deepwater had continued to grow and improve from the sub one per cent level to an aggregate contribution of over 25 per cent, from engineering man-hours of less than 20,000 to over 1.1million in recent Egina project.
The GMD urged the players in the deep water sector to start to create the linkages to the local economy, saying that the local economy must be able to deliver the growth aspirations or support adequately the demand of tomorrow.
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