Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has officially inaugurated Nigerian Petroleum Development Co.’s (NPDC) integrated gas handling facility at Oredo.
Located in Edo State’s OML 111, the facility will receive gas from the Oredo field and should halt flaring.
“Scaling up utilisation of Nigeria’s abundant natural gas resources will help spur industrialisation”, Buhari said. He noted that 2020 was the country’s year of gas. The Oredo plant will be the largest onshore LPG plant in Nigeria targeting the domestic market.
Launching the plant moves Nigeria a “step closer to self sufficiency and supports growth for small and medium sized enterprises. The Oredo plant will create hundreds of direct, and indirect, employment opportunities and will also support the ongoing drive for alternative auto fuel,” the president said.
Self sufficiency
The Oredo field will provide 200 million cubic feet per day of wet gas to the plant. It will produce around 84 mmcf per day of lean gas. The field produces around 10,000 barrels per day of oil.
The operator will export this gas to the local market via the Escravos Lagos Pipeline System (ELPS), producing a potential 367 MW of power.
It will also produce 330 tonnes per day of LPG, 345 tonnes of propane and 2,600 barrels of condensate. The plant will meet 20% of Nigeria’s LPG demand.
“This translates into a daily load out of 17 trucks of LPG and 22 trucks of propane,” Nigerian National Petroleum Corp.’s (NNPC) managing director Mele Kyari said.
Kyari noted the importance of gas revenues during 2020, when oil prices plummeted. “This has given us the courage to pursue other projects,” he said. NPDC is a “leading supplier of gas” for the domestic market and is expected to be the country’s top producer of oil in two or three years, the NNPC official said.
Local companies Network Oil and Gas carried out work on the project, while Loneb Resources Nigeria was a subcontractor for piping and structures. NPDC opted to go ahead with the plan in 2015. The company expects revenues from the plant to be around $200mn per year.