•NNPC intensifies efforts to block $1.283bn Seplat-Mobil deal, gets court injunctionEmmanuel Addeh in Abuja and Peter Uzoho in Lagos with agency report
The duo of the Managing Director of NLNG, Dr Philip Mshelbila and the company’s General Manager, Production, Mr. Leye Falade, made the disclosures during separate panel sessions at the just concluded Nigerian Oil and Gas Conference and Exhibition 2022 in Abuja. He said such deficits had resulted to the collapse of the value chain between gas and power, which had been broken for decades and had not been fixed.
Describing the Decade of Gas Work plan as an excellent piece of work, Mshelbila observed that it had looked at the demand side of natural gas in Nigeria both domestic and export, the supply side, the infrastructure side, the commercial or economic framework needed to address all the problems and had equally outlined very specific things needed to be done to address them.
“All of that is understood at high level. And what the Decade of Gas says is: the operator needs to sit with all the relevant parties and this is with the ministry, with the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board , everybody, and say, what is it going to take to ensure that this project gets delivered in the interest of Nigeria? So, that also has been outlined.
The Train 7 project seeks to increase NLNG’s liquefied gas supply capacity by 35 per cent to 30 million tonnes per annum from the existing 22mpta. “So we’re looking at Train 8, but we’re looking at it not from a capacity increase point of view. We’re looking at it from one that enables us to reduce our overall carbon footprint. So the technology design that we’re looking at for Train 8 is the one that lowers our overall greenhouse emission intensity at site. That’s the technology that we’re bringing into it.
The Seplat transaction involves the acquisition of the entire offshore shallow water business of ExxonMobil in Nigeria and was expected to deliver 186 per cent increase in production from 51,000 bpd to 146,000 bpd. It showed that the state-run company sued Mobil Producing Nigeria Unlimited on July 5, asking the court to either to order that a dispute had occurred between the parties over preemption rights, or to order them to take the matter to arbitration.
“Seplat Energy PLC recently became aware that, on 5 July 2022, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited commenced an action at the State High Court of the Federal Capital Territory in Abuja, Nigeria in relation to the acquisition of the entire shares of Mobil Producing Nigeria Unlimited .