With gross output expected to reach over 10,000 Barrels of Oil Per Day (BOPD) on hook up of the second of its two well campaign, the Nigerian independent Green Energy International (GEIL) is considering the limitations of its current evacuation infrastructure.
The company’s production leaped from 4,651BOPD in June 2022, through 5,199BOPD in July 2022 to 7,596BOPD in August 2022, largely on account of the tie in of one of the two wells. The output performance has been beyond the company’s expectations.
Five years after first oil from Otakikpo field onshore eastern Nigeria, the operator envisages the possibility of an output higher than 20,000BOPD from what was initially identified as a “marginal field”. The company currently pumps its crude volumes into Amni International’s Ima Floating Storage and Offloading (FSO) Terminal. But until August 2022, output had been less than 6,500BOPD.
“If we do 10,000 Barrels of Oil Per Day (BOPD) now and we want to go to 25,000BOPD, we are going to have a challenge with our evacuation”, says Anthony Adegbulugbe, GEIL’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO). “Our present evacuation option will not work. If you want to take off on that scale and you are still depending on a third-party terminal, is that reasonable? Due to no fault of yours, if they close down for just one day, please multiply 25,000 by $50 and you will understand the amount of money that is on the table. We have not closed out any options and we might still build our own terminal. We might still talk with the likes of Notore and so forth. But definitely by the time we are going to 10,000 barrels, we have 140,000 barrels storage onsite now and that is 14 days. If we are now going to 10,000 would 14 days storage be reasonable? If there is some problem on the other side and you keep on producing, in just 14 days you won’t have any storage capacity and those are some of the issues that we are looking at. Every option is on the table and we are still looking for ways to debottleneck our processing facility and a lot of interesting things are going on. Again, this goes back our original philosophy of taking things step by step”.
