Tunde Afolabi’s Amni International Petroleum and TotalEnergies signed an $800 million final investment decision on Wednesday, Sept. 23, to develop the Ima gas field offshore Nigeria, 53 years after it was discovered.
The field was found in 1973 and never developed. It sits about eight kilometres off Bonny Island in Rivers State, across Oil Mining Leases 112 and 117, and will produce 350 million standard cubic feet of gas a day once it starts. TotalEnergies is targeting first gas by the end of 2028.
What it will feed is Nigeria LNG. The Ima gas will supply about a third of the feedstock for Train 7, the expansion that lifts the plant’s liquefaction capacity from 22 million tonnes a year to 30 million. Nigeria holds the largest proven gas reserves in Africa and has spent years struggling to keep its own export terminal supplied.
Nigerian banks are paying for most of it. Financial institutions in the country arranged about 77% of the financing, with Zenith Bank, Access Bank, United Bank for Africa, Guaranty Trust Bank, Standard Bank, Standard Chartered and First Abu Dhabi Bank among the lenders. An offshore gas development of this size in Nigeria has historically depended on foreign balance sheets.
Mathieu Bouyer, managing director of TotalEnergies EP Nigeria, called the decision a major vote of confidence in Nigeria’s oil and gas industry and its investment environment.
He said the project should generate between $2 billion and $4 billion of value over its life, depending on oil and gas prices, and that four major work packages will go to Nigerian contractors, with more than 60% of the local work carried out by people from host communities in Rivers State.
President Bola Tinubu welcomed the decision.
Afolabi took his degree in geology the year the field was found. He graduated from Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania in 1973 and took a master’s at Tulane in New Orleans in 1975, then worked for Texaco in Louisiana from 1974 and Mobil in Dallas from 1979.
He founded Amni in Lagos in 1993, when Nigeria first began awarding oil blocks to indigenous companies, and still runs it as chairman and chief executive after more than forty years in the industry.
Amni holds gas reserves of about 3.5 trillion cubic feet. Its OML 112 licence, awarded originally as OPL 469 and converted to a 25-year lease in 1998, covers roughly 437 square kilometres, and its Okoro field has produced oil since June 2008. The company moved into Ghana in 2014 with a deep-water block called Central Tano.
TotalEnergies has held a position in the block for two decades. It bought a 40% interest in OML 112 in 2005 through its Nigerian subsidiary, then relinquished its rights in the Okoro and Setu fields, which let Amni bring in the British-listed Afren to develop them in 2006.
The decision comes seven months after a difficult one. A Federal High Court in Lagos appointed a court-supervised administrator over key Amni assets in February, in a commercial dispute involving about $15 million. Neither company has said how that matter has progressed.
Afolabi holds the national honour of Member of the Order of the Federal Republic.
Source: billionaires.africa