Norway’s Golar gets deal to build floating LNG plant in Nigeria

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has signed an agreement with Norwegian Golar LNG, an operator of marine LNG infrastructure, to build a floating LNG plant in Nigeria.

The deal was signed at the NNPC Towers in Abuja on April 26, the NNPC said in a social media post.

It did not reveal further details about the project beyond saying the plan to build the floating LNG plant is a further effort to deepen Nigeria’s domestic gas utilisation and enhance gas export.

– Why its important

Nigeria has struggled for years to build infrastructure to harness its gas wealth. It burns off large quantities of gas generated during oil production, asset that could be exported or used to generate electricity.

This should be Nigeria’s second floating LNG plant, useful for oil offshore oil platforms.

– Learn more

The NNPC’s unit LNG Investment Management Services is working on Nigeria’s first floating LNG project in partnership with a local private crude oil sales company UTM Offshore.

The facility, said to be the first such project developed by an African company on the continent, will have a liquefaction capacity of 1.2 million tonnes each year.

It will use the resources from the Yoho gas field owned by ExxonMobil and the NNPC. The project is supported by $5 billion from the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank).

In 2021, UTM Offshore awarded the contract for the conceptual design service to JGC Corporation. In late 2022, the consortium of JGC and Technip Energies secured the front-end engineering and design (FEED) contract with the completion date set for December 2023.