Shell Company has concluded plans to complete the building of the world class Bonga south west project, with a final investment decision taken by year-end 2014, Vice President Nigeria and Gabon Shell Upstream International, Mr Droll, disclosed this at the just concluded oil and gas conference in Abuja.
Bonga is the first deepwater project for the Shell Nigeria Exploration and Production Company (SNEPCO) and for Nigeria. The discovery well is located in oil prospecting License (OPL) 212, which was awarded during Nigeria’s first round of deepwater frontier acreage awards in 1993.
Crude oil production from the field started in November 2005 and the first shipment from the field, was made in February 2006. Production was stopped temporarily due to a militant attack in June 2008 and was resumed later in the same month.
Shell is also embarking on a number of large gas projects to keep liquefied natural gas supplied to Nigeria to make sure the country maintain its strategic position in the global LNG market, Droll said .
Other projects embarked by the company to expand Nigeria’s gas supply and processing capacity include the Assa North/Ohaji South project work, one of the largest ever gas project in Nigeria.
Lamenting the challenges faced by the company in Nigeria, Mr Droll said oil theft impacted on production in 2013 “In SPDC alone, we removed around 300 such connections on oil infrastructure. Removing such connections often requires production systems to be shut down, so there is a compound effect between what is stolen and what can’t be produced due to facilities outages”
Speaking further, Droll said even though the industry has learned and adapted to some of these threats, it has not done so without a cost “clearly, both development and operating costs are substantially higher than in many other operating environments”
