Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu, says Nigeria is currently producing about 1.78 million barrel per day and about 350,000bpd of condensates.
According to Bloomberg, the minister on Tuesday, while speaking in Abuja, said he also expected production from new Egina deposit to rise to 150,000bpd by the end of January.
“Currently studying how much of Egina is crude and how much is condensate. If it is pure crude it raises concern and other implications in terms of OPEC production Quota? If it is condensates, then obviously we smile,” Kachikwu told Bloomberg.
Energy research analyst at Ecobank Jubril Kareem in a tweet, however, said “under OPEC’s 1.2 million production cut agreement, Nigeria is expected to keep oil production at 1.738m barrels/day (excluding other liquids).”
He said, the development will take Nigeria’s total liquid (crude oil, condensate etc) above 2.1m b/day in 2019.
“This is still below the proposed budget benchmark of 2.3mln bpd,” Kareem tweeted.
Kachikwu also noted that contract awarded for replacement of corroded crude pipeline for Opkoho and Okono fields on OML 119 would cost $37 million, which after completion is expected to double asset’s output to 40,000bpd.
Days before OPEC’s production cuts started on January 1, France’s Total had started up oil production from Nigeria’s ultra-deepwater oil field Egina, which is expected to produce 200,000 bpd at peak output.
The Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) unit that was used to develop the ultra-deep Egina oil field is the largest such unit that Total has ever built, according to the French group. Total noted that the plateau production at the ultra-deepwater field would be 200,000 barrels of oil per day, which would account for some 10 percent of Nigeria’s oil production.
The situation with Egina is a dilemma for Nigeria, which wasn’t spared from the new OPEC/non-OPEC production cuts this time around, is expected to contribute with up to 40,000 bpd to the 800,000 bpd OPEC had pledged to cut from January, Nigerian Oil The 40,000-bpd figure is some 2.5 percent of Nigeria’s current crude oil production of 1.7mbpd, the minister said in the first half of December.
Following a wave of militant violence in 2016 and early 2017, Nigeria’s oil production started to recover in the latter half of 2017, when attacks on oil infrastructure subsided. According to the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), the country’s oil production increased by 9 percent in 2018 compared to 2017, the NNPC Group’s Managing Director Maikanti Baru said in a statement.
Total is set to begin exports from the new ultra-deep Egina oil field offshore Nigeria as early as in February 2019, at an initial rate of just over 100,000bpd, Bloomberg reported four weeks ago, quoting a copy of a loading programme for the new grade it had seen.
