The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) signed a $2.5bn pre-payment agreement with Nigeria LNG for upstream gas development projects to supply gas to NLNG Trains 1 – 6.
NNPC’s general managing director, Mallam Mele Kyari said the agreement will help resolve the issues regarding gas supply to trains 1-6, at the facility, adding that there was a need to fast-track action on the process of bringing more trains on stream.
He added that the pre-payment gas supply agreement was a milestone which aligned with the government’s aspirations of monetizing the nation’s gas resources, protecting the investment in NLNG, ensuring full capacity utilization (22mtpa LNG and 5mtpa NGLs) of Trains 1-6 plants and providing new vistas of growth opportunities in the nation’s LNG sector.
Additionally, NNPC challenged shareholders of Nigeria LNG to work towards expanding the production capacity of the project beyond Train 7 at the liquefaction plant on Bonny Island.
The Train 7 project is expected to expand NLNG’s production capacity by 35 percent from 22 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) to 30 mtpa.
NLNG is owned by four shareholders, namely, the Federal Government of Nigeria, represented by NNPC (49 percent), Shell (25.6 percent), Total (15 percent), and Eni (10.4 percent).
In September, Nigeria LNG signed a Letter of Intent (LOI) for the engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) of Train 7 with a consortium comprising Saipem, Chiyoda and Daewoo.