West African Govts in Talks With LADOL for FPSO Fabrication

Eromosele Abiodun

Executive Chairman, Lagos Deep Offshore Logistics Base (LADOL), Mr Ladipopo Jadesimi has revealed that governments in some West African countries are in talks with LADOL to assist them with their own FPSOs following the successful fabrication and integration of the Egina FPSO in Nigeria.

He stated this in Lagos when the Deputy Comptroller General of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), Mrs Patience Iferi paid a working visit to LADOL.

LADOL is currently playing host to the fabrication of the $3.8billion oil and gas logistics service facility commonly known as the Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessel to be deployed to the Egina project.

The project which has been applauded as first -of- its- kind in the sub-Saharan Africa is being handled by the Korea-based Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI) on behalf of TOTAL Oil Exploration, with LADOL serving as its local content partner.

While expressing optimism that LADOL expects to host other fabrications in the near future, he said it will be impossible for any other African country that has offshore oil and gas to be able to replicate the LADOL facility for a long time.

According to him, “I say so because it is a huge investment, this one cost over $300 million and that was a few years ago. If you are to start today it will cost to or three times more. So, I don’t see any other African country that can catch up with Nigeria in this regard. That was what the founders of LADOL had in mind to capture for Nigeria the lion share of all offshore related fabrication, integration.

“I can share with you publicly here that government in the region are already engaging us to see how we can assist them so that their own FPSOs will be done in Nigeria such that they will be able to bring their people to work and train. Otherwise, the whole expenditure-this FPSO is over $3 billion and until this, all of the expenditures on other FPSOs were made in South Korea or elsewhere and the FPSO then tolled only as far as the pint offshore where the FPSO will do its business.”

He added: “We are going to generate billions of naira in terms of duty and this FPSO when it eventually leaves, because it is going to remain in the Nigerian territory, the customs will assessed the duty and this duty I am sure will be in the billions of naira. So it is a win-win situation. In the immediate future all we have in our programme we are going to unfold, they will not only add significant value to the economy, in terms of employment and so on, it is going to generate a very substantial amount of customs revenue.”

He further stated that the ongoing FPSO integration is the only type in Africa stressing that the FPSO is the largest in the fleet of Total Nigeria Plc.

“Why it took so long for Nigeria to achieve this is because of the kind of investment required to build the facility that can host an FPSO, do the fabrication and integration. This effort is also affect other facilities around. As we are fabricating in LADOL, we have also given jobs to others around the country from Lagos to Port Harcourt and Warri. If this was not done here there would not have been the opportunity for others around the country. In terms of employment, it is not only here that people are working they are also elsewhere doing fabrication.

“Our next immediate focus is in agriculture and agricultural processing both for internal consumption and for export, we are going to be involved in the energy sector, turbines and similar power related products. We are also going to be involved in transportation and things like mobile phones. Now that we have achieved the core developmental assets we are now going to be unfolding all these other programmes.

“We are also going to be involved in training; as a matter of fact we are setting up an academy in the next few months to train hundreds of Nigerians in various skills that will make them extremely useful. You can’t grow an economy without the man power to grow with that is the most important resource that Nigeria has. Investment is very important because that is our future and of course to make this resource achieve its potential, we need to provide them training in all the relevant skills,” he said.