ExxonMobil Is Now Betting on Nigeria’s Domestic Gas Market

By Toyin Akinosho

ExxonMobil will handle the upstream and midstream parts of the Qua Iboe Independent Power Project.
The company’s joint venture with NNPC will deliver the required 100MMscf/d to fire the plant, from the Oso field, in the country’s prolific south east offshore.

The NNPC/ExxonMobil JV will construct a 400MMscf/ gas processing plant and a pipeline from Oso to Qua Iboe Terminal.
These facts fly in the face of insinuations that, with a partnership between Black Rhino and Dangote Industries signing a 540 MW Power Purchase Agreement with the Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading Plc (NBET), ExxonMobil had finally let go of the project, conceived close to two decades ago.

As things stand, in fact, the Qua Iboe IPP should, indeed, make ExxonMobil play a bigger role in domestic gas market than it currently does. The company has been the only multinational without a processing plant-meant for producing lean gas- to its name in Nigeria.

Instead it constructs projects around stripping Natural gas Liquids for sale and injecting what would otherwise have been flared, to increase crude output.

“With a 400MMscf/d gas plant and a pipeline from offshore gas field to shore, they will be playing a bigger role in the domestic gas space”, sources at the NNPC, the senior JV partner, say.

“Whoever wants to offtake gas from the remaining 300MMscf/d capacity not dedicated to the QIIPP has to construct its own evacuation infrastructure to the QIT”.