Drilling Rig for 200,000bpd Egina Oilfield Sails to Nigeria

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The drilling rig, christened ‘West Jupiter,’ which will be used for the drilling of all the oil wells at the 200,000 barrels per day Egina deepwater oilfield, being developed by Total Upstream Companies in Nigeria has sailed away from South Korea, thus demonstrating another milestone in the development of the $3.5 billion Egina project.

Speaking during the ground – breaking ceremony of the fabrication yard for local integration of the Egina Floating Production Storage Offshore (FPSO) vessel in Lagos at the weekend, the Managing Director of Total Upstream Companies in Nigeria, Mrs. Elisabeth Proust said the rig would arrive in Nigerian waters in November 2014 to start the drilling of the Egina wells in December 2014.

Proust said the Egina project had achieved almost 20 per cent performance of the expected works.

According to her, the ground-breaking ceremony is another milestone for the Egina project as it marked the first start of the in-country facility development, in which the modules built in Nigeria would be integrated onto the Egina FPSO in 2017.

“This is another milestone coming after many others already achieved in the past few months, such as the procurement of the drilling Tubulars, the gas export and Water Injection line pipelines; the first Well-Heads set; the steel cutting in-country for Living Quarters and subsea manifolds and finally, last week, the sail away of the drilling rig, West Jupiter to Nigeria,” she said.

Proust, who was represented at the occasion by the Deputy Managing Director of Total, in charge of Deepwater Manager, Mr. Charles Ngoka said Egina was a key project for Total in  Nigeria and a strong partnership with the Nigerian government, other international oil companies and local contractors.

Proust said her company had brought its expertise in this partnership and had also been able to increase local collaboration and Nigerian content in its operations through this initiative.

She said projects such as Egina empowered Total to further demonstrate its commitment to the Nigerian economy and her people.
“Total is fully committed to achieving the Nigerian Content Sustainability Target by ensuring teamwork between the international oil companies and local contractors. The main objective is to foster technology transfer, knowledge sharing and local skills development. As the first major project to be started under the Nigerian Content Act of 2010, Egina has overcome challenges with the LADOL initiative and created a landmark for the oil and gas industry in Nigeria,” she added.

Samsung and LADOL had established a new partnership called SHI-MCI Free Zone Enterprise to build Africa’s first FPSO integration and fabrication facility in LADOL free zone in Lagos.

Located 130 kilometres offshore in Oil Mining Lease (OML) 130 in deep offshore Nigeria, the Egina field development is a project to build FPSO for Total Upstream Nigeria Limited and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).

The FPSO would be one of the largest in the world, with a storage capacity of 2.3 million barrels of crude oil and a targeted production capacity of 200,000 barrels per day.