Financial Energy Review
………by James Ikenna………..
The Nigerian Petroleum Development Company (NPDC), the upstream subsidary of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation’s (NNPC) has reported an explosion at its production facility in Oil Mining Lease (OML) 40 which has led to the damage of its marine storage vessel and will stall the production of about 10,000 barrels of oil per day.
The OML40 production asset which involves its partners Elcrest Exploration and Production Nigeria Limited had couple of months back witnessed a similar fatal explosion in which lives were lost but a statement from NNPC has said that the current explosion did not involve lives.
The explosion is said to have occurred while carrying out production evacuation at Gbetiokun Early Production facility.
The OML 40 licence lies onshore in the north-western Niger Delta, approximately 65 km northwest of Warri, and covers an area of 498 square kilometres. Elcrest E&P completed the acquisition of a 45 percent equity stake in OML 40 in September 2012, and has been producing oil from the Opuama field since 2014.
The terrain is mangrove swamp intersected by the Benin River. Production from Opuama had started in 1975 peaking one year later, at 11,000 barrels per day. Production was exported by pipeline 67 kilometres south to Shell’s Forcados oil terminal.
The Gbetiokun oil field offshore Nigeria had come on stream through an early production facility. The initial production rose to 12,000 barrels per day from the Gbetiokun-1 and Gbetiokun-3 wells in the southwestern area of OML 40. The early production facility has nominal capacity of 22,000 b/d. Shuttle tankers had been carrying the crude to the main OML export pipeline.
NNPC’s Group General Manager, Public Affairs Division, Kennie Obateru in a statement on the explosion, said there were no fatalities or injuries and no significant spill in the incident.
“There was, however, significant damage to the marine storage vessel, MT Harcourt, which will impact production by about 10,000 barrels of oil per day. NNPC has since commenced investigation to ascertain the cause of the incident with a view to averting future occurrence,” he said.
