The Nigerian company that took over the local operation of ExxonMobil wants to double production within six months, after moving in to take advantage of the retreat of foreign majors from the county’s onshore oil sector. London-listed Seplat completed its purchase of a range of oil and gas assets owned by the US energy giant in December after a delay of more than two years by Nigerian regulators to sign off on the deal.
Seplat senior management said the plan was to more than double output from about 50,000 barrels a day to roughly 120,000 bpd over the six-month period. “The assets have had very minimal investments until now,” Seplat’s chief financial officer Eleanor Adaralegbe told the Financial Times in an interview. “We expect that once we come in there will be an opportunity to grow that much further.” The $1.28bn acquisition of Mobil Producing Nigeria Unlimited makes Seplat one of the biggest domestic producers with an asset base of 11 onshore oil blocks, 48 oil and gas fields, three export terminals and five gas processing facilities. The combined assets mean Seplat controls 16 percent of Nigeria’s present production capacity, according to chief executive Roger Brown. Seplat will run the assets in conjunction with state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Company as legally mandated in the country’s oil and gas industry. Brown said his company was confident that it could work with NNPC to raise overall production, a stated goal of Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu. NNPC has been criticised for decades of alleged corruption and mismanagement and last year admitted it owed its suppliers money, estimated to be more than $6bn. “We have no concerns working with NNPC . . . There’s been a massive change with President Tinubu, realising that production is a great way of getting dollars into the country and supporting the currency,” Brown said. Many of the Nigerian assets require time and investment so they can produce again after being left idl