Excitement greets industry over $3.8bn Egina FPSO launch

Excitement greeted the maritime industry weekend for the first Egina Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessel partially fabricated and integrated in Africa, and the largest vessel to ever berth in Nigeria, successfully leaving the Lagos Deep Offshore Logistics Base (LADOL) Free Zone Sunday.

The FPSO was said to have left LADOL base at about 5:40am Sunday morning to the Egina oilfield, located approximately 200 kilometres south of Port Harcourt. It is expected that the FPSO will add 200,000 barrels of oil per day to the country’s current production capacity.

A statement by LADOL said that the launch of the FPSO vessel was witnessed by Nicolas Terraz, managing director of Total; Ahmadu-Kida Musa, deputy managing director of Total, and Amy Jadesimi, managing director of LADOL.

The statement disclosed that the above named officials arrived LADOL Free Zone at 4:30am while other representatives from government agencies that have been instrumental in the completion of the vessel at LADOL, including the Nigeria Export and Processing Zones Authority (NEPZA), Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), Nigerian Customs Services and Nigerian Immigration Services were also present when the vessel departed.

“We thank President Buhari and his administration for doing away with monopoly and putting in place an ease of business regime that has ensured the successful execution and completion of this project,” Amy Jadesimi said in the statement.

She stated: “At 05:00 am NPA tugs masterfully took the largest FPSO in the world out of LADOL Free Zone in Lagos Harbour to the open sea. Thank you to NPA and NEPZA for working together with us and taking giant strides forward, making Nigeria the West African Maritime and Industrial Hub.

“As said during the recent visit of Vice-President Oluyemi Osinbajo to LADOL, this achievement is going to have its biggest impact on the industrialisation of Nigeria – particular in non-petroleum sectors.

By completing this work on time and on budget, she said, that LADOL and its partner have demonstrated to the world that the most complex and challenging industrial projects in the world can be completed in Nigeria. “The next step is for LADOL to work towards ensuring that the 50,000 new jobs which can be created due to the LADOL facilities are created.

“With a multiplier effect of 10 to one on job creation, 90 percent of these jobs will be created outside LADOL in companies and yards across Nigeria. At least half the jobs will be created in Micro-Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs),” she said.

According to Jadesimi, LADOL is now focused on working with government and other real private sector companies in Nigeria to help ensure that these jobs are created and that the enabling environment is extended to include policies that will keep Nigerians that worked on the FPSO employed – as well as ensure that tens of thousands more are employed in future projects.