Indigenous, Chinese firm sign gas plant contract

Southfield Petroleum Limited, an indigenous oil and gas company has signed a $198 million Equipment, Procurement and Construction (EPC) contract with China Machinery Engineering Corporation (CMEC) to construct a 250 million standard cubic feet per day (MMScfd) gas processing facility in Nigeria.

The project, which has been scheduled for completion by 2018, is expected to be funded by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), the bankers of CMEC.

The China Machinery Engineering Corporation team was led to the signing ceremony by its Group Vice President, Jin Chunsheng and was received in Abuja by the Southfield Petroleum team led by the Managing Director, Dr. Patrick Ndiomu.

The CMEC team also used the opportunity of their meeting with Southfield Petroleum to pay courtesy visits to the Minister of Petroleum Dr Ibe Kachikwu and the Group Executive Director, Upstream of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Bello B. Rabiu.

The company said in a statement on Monday, that the EPC contract also made provision for the construction of facilities such as a captive Jetty, 24 Mega Watts captive power, a 14,000MT Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) storage facility, 3,000 Metric Tonnes (MT) LPG barge, office buildings, infrastructure, the construction of an Amine Unit to extract the Carbon Dioxide from the gas and a robust training programme for Nigerians.

It stated: “The facilities will be operational at the Utorogu gas field by second quarter of 2018 and will have an annual production of 200,000MT of LPG. The facility will be initially operated by CMEC while Nigerians are being trained to ensure technology transfer and capacity development.