By Peter Uzoho
Duport Midstream Energy Park currently under construction at Egbokor, Edo State, is speedily approaching inauguration as the overall project has attained 90 per cent completion, the company has disclosed.
The multi-million dollar integrated facility reputed to be the largest in the world, houses mostly scalable sub-facilities including the 10,000 barrels per day (bpd) capacity modular refinery, 60 million standard cubic feet (scf) Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) processing plant, 10 million scf Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) plant, 15 megawatts power plant, and a 4-tier smart data centre.
Being built by a Nigerian indigenous oil and gas company in partnership with the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB), the project is one of the outcome of the federal government’s refinery revolution policy aimed at achieving the country’s self-sufficiency in finished petroleum products.
The Chief Executive Officer, Duport Midstream Company Limited, Dr Akintoye Akindele, disclosed during a media parley in Lagos recently, that the first phase of the ambitious project has reached 90 per cent completion and would be inaugurated in October 1, 2021.
“They are read, CNG is already built, it’s ready, power plant is already built and ready, refinery is already built and ready, gas processing plant is built and ready. Everything is built, it’s 90 per cent complete.
“So, we will start testing this things September 1 and commission it October 1. We will start installation July and that should be done within 60 days. Come October 1, the first energy park where you have gas, refinery, power and modular LNG goes life first time in the world,” Akindele said.
When operating, he said the refinery which is starting with 2,500bpd would be processing 145 million litres of white products including diesel and naphtha, every day, and that when scaled up to 10,000 bpd, it would be processing about one billion litres.
The Duport CEO said 70 per cent of the work on the project was delivered in-country in compliance with the local content provisions, adding that only 30 per cent was done outside Nigeria which included the refinery and the CNG compressor.
Speaking on what drove the company to embark on the project, he said: “It’s basically a play on us trying to convert resources that we were given, that we were endowed with and from more than common wealth to share the wealth.
“Each of the things I mentioned, from refinery to gas, and power, those are critical projects we have in Nigeria and they are all big on their own whereby if you put them together, the cost becomes a bit more optimised, they share resources.”
He noted that while thinking about the project, the company realised that the best way to start solving Nigeria’s problems in energy was by making the process last mile, where people could access it easily and by making the course scalable to cut down cost.
Akindele said when it fully becomes operational, the energy park would create about 2,000 direct and indirect jobs, saying currently, hundreds of Nigerians are working at the project site.
Revealing that apart from making refined petroleum products more available and affordable to users, the power plant was positioned to impact residents and industries around the area, Akindele added that over 200 students would be trained at the facility, with stipends, every year.
He further said: “We can actually power close to 1gigawatt here, imagine what it would do to people in that area. We have industries and other plants there, they don’t have to look for diesel or even if they are using diesel, they get it at good prices.
“The primary impact is the jobs that we create. Directly or indirectly, over 2000 jobs. Already, we have a couple of hundred working on it before we even go life. Imagine how many students we will train.
“We are doing borehole for them, we are adopting hospitals, we are doing scholarships and we are opening minds. This is huge in terms of impact but it’s small, it’s a tiny drop because we have about 20 million people looking for jobs.”
