Daily Independent Online.
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Tuesday, June 22, 2004.
Omoku
Gas Station: Rivers’ turbine of Hope?
By Odudu Okpongete
Reporter, Port Harcourt
The
entire fenced site is more like a congested seaport. And every possible step
within it is obstructed to a point by heavy containers. Some appear to have
been emptied while others are in the process of being stripped open. But if you
mistook it for a mini-seaport you are wrong. There is scanty human traffic.
There is no scary sea overlooking the horizon. And the slippery nature of the
topsoil demands the wearing of factory boots to ease movement.
Welcome
to the Omoku Gas Turbine Station. Located in Obrikom, a major host community to
the Nigerian Agip Oil Company (NAOC), the site is 300 kilometers away from the
Orashi River. Originally, a well- flooded landscape, the engineering firm
handling the Independent Power Project (IPP) of the Rivers State Government -
Rockson Engineering - could attest to the fact that siting such project in the
Niger Delta is, indeed, a very costly venture. To raise the ground to an
acceptable level, the site had to be sand-filled from the nearby river with the
aid of a dredger. The topsoil had to be excavated severally to make way for the
sand- filling.
This
is aside the vibro-pile operations done on the site by the firm. Altogether,
840 piles were put up on the site because of the nature of the soil.
“We
had to excavate the topsoil up to about 4 meters, and thereafter burrow a lot
of soil to get to the level we are operating, because we needed to have a
highly elevated site,” says Gbenga Tijani, Design Manager for Rockson
Engineering.
The
issue, however, is not really the difficult topography of the Niger Delta that
could make project location such as this a nightmare. The good news is that,
work at the Omoku Turbine Station - the third built by the Rivers State
Government to ensure sufficiency in power generation - is moving at a fast
pace. The station has two bases capable of accommodating three turbines each.
Already, four of such turbines have been installed.
Of
all the turbine stations that the Dr. Peter Odili government has invested in,
the one in Omoku appears to be the largest in scope. Besides its total power
output, which is put at 150 mega watts, power will also be drawn from here to
feed the Trans Amadi and Eleme turbine stations.
Perhaps,
the greatest significance of the station still undergoing construction is that
it will come on stream with its own grid, independent of the National Electric
Power Authority (NEPA). From here too, submarine cables are to be laid through
a special barge to ensure that the riverine areas enjoy power from the turbine
stations.
In
the project design, the submarine cables are expected to run from Kaa in Ogoni
land through Opobo, to Orotokpowo and Rumuokoro, in Port Harcourt. The cables
would continue from Eleme to Ogu before moving to Finima, in Bonny, home to the
Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) project.
Originally,
the contract for the transmission lines ended in Bori, but under the present
expansion, the contract runs to border communities with Akwa Ibom State. Tijani
explained that they preferred submarine cabling because it is less expensive.
“At
every sub-station, we will have transformers to reduce the voltage before
sending to communities,” he added.
Like
many of such gigantic project, meeting the deadline for commissioning has been
problematic. From the earlier publicised June date by the government, the
deadline has now been shifted to the end of September this year. And the firm
handling the project blames the delay on the diversion of the materials
originally slated to berth at the Onne Port to the Lagos Port. Last February, a
Presidential Task Force on port decongestion had directed that the Onne Port be
closed, forcing it to move the goods to Lagos.
But
the state Commissioner for Power, Mr. Akeodi Oyaghiri, adds another hurdle: the
inability of Agip to supply gas to the station. Actually, the site for the
Omoku Turbine Station was chosen because of its proximity to Agip facility at
Obrikom. Only 200 meters of pipeline is needed to transport gas to the station.
Before
now, such excuses would have heightened the tempo of criticisms against the
power project. After all, a lot of Rivers people see the gas turbine project as
a fluke and a conduit pipe for milking the state treasury. But with the power
purchase agreement signed between NEPA and the state government last week over
the Trans Amadi Gas Turbine Station, it appears the pessimists are beginning to
have a re-think.
Quite
a few really believed the state government’s claim that the station is
generating excess power, which NEPA could not cope with, or that the station
does not work at all. Bad enough, of the 500 mega watts said to be required in
the state, NEPA manages to produce 150 mega watts.
With
the purchase agreement signed on behalf of NEPA by the Power and Steel
Minister, Senator Liyel Imoke, it is now clear that Rivers will receive 70 per
cent of the revenue accruing from the sale of power generated while 30 per cent
of such revenue would go to the power authority. The agreement is expected to
take retrospective effect from the time NEPA began lifting power from the
station. Indeed, the total power generated from the two turbines is put at 36
mega watts, but actual generation output is estimated at between 27 and 30 mega
watts. The shortfall, according to the operators, is as a result of
differentials in weather conditions.
Anglo-Dutch oil giants, Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC),
supplies gas to the Trans Amadi Turbine Station while the Nigeria Gas Company
feeds the broken down Eleme Station the same product.
Yet,
if the public displayed some level of pessimism about the workability of the
power project, the government must take all the blames. The hype about the gas
turbines, the controversies surrounding its cost, and genuineness of the
manufacturers of the plant contributed much to such hopelessness. Governor
Odili and his cabinet members never helped matters at all. Even at the point
the refurbished Eleme Gas Turbine Station had totally shut down, the refrain
was that the state enjoys uninterrupted power supply. And government never
owned up until youths in the area began issuing inflammatory statements over
the state of the turbine station.
There
is nothing yet to show that some lessons have been learnt about the limitation
of propaganda over the project. Not with the recent appointment of Magnus Abe
as the Commissioner for Information. Late last year, Abe in a
self-congratulatory statement aired on the state-owned radio, had thanked the
governor for initiating the power project. That weekend, the commissioner had
claimed that NEPA had relied solely on the Trans Amadi station for power
generation after its plants shut down. Yet, if you had asked a lot of residents
of Port Harcourt where the station is supposed to service that weekend, they
would have told you they never enjoyed something close to steady electricity.
This is, perhaps, where Oyaghiri is different from Abe, two lawyers turned into
gas turbine experts by the Odili administration.
In
Oyaghiri, you get something more than half-truths about the power project, even
much more than his predecessor, Mr. Reginald Wilcox. At least, we know that the
three turbines cost as much as 31 billion dollars. We also know that the
producer of the turbines is an Italian firm based in Florence, an industrial
city.
There
is nothing to fear about how the turbines are to be run. About nine engineers
from the power ministry had been sent on a one-month crash training programme
in Italy to learn basic maintenance, mechanical construction and operations of
the turbines. Another batch is in similar training course to France. The only
fears had been that those selected for the training were mostly ageing
engineers, who might be due for retirement in a short time. But Oyaghiri
believes there is nothing to worry about, as they are expected to impart the
knowledge acquired on those who have not been given such opportunity.
If
the state government must erase the despair about the power project, it is for
those who carried the hype to ensure the turbines provide steady electricity.
In recent times, where power outage has worsened, it could be difficult to
convince residents that the Trans Amadi station is generating power at all,
except you believe the theory that NEPA cannot distribute the power generated
from there because of ageing equipment. As Oyaghiri put it during a press chat
at the Omoku plant last month, “if people sit down somewhere and ask,
‘does the turbine work or not?’ Of course, you do not blame the
layman. For him, it is the electric bulb above his head that he looks up to. If
the electricity is there, then the turbine is working; if not, the turbine is
not working.”
