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 Daily
Independent Online.
* Tuesday, June 22, 2004.
‘NETCO committed to end gas flaring in
2008’
By Charles Okonji
Snr Business Correspondent, Lagos
The National Engineering and
Technical Company (NETCO) has reiterated its commitment to the Federal
Government’s plan to end routine gas flaring in oil operations by 2008.
The company’s Business Development Manager, Mr. Sheldon Ekpo, who
disclosed this, said it would remain in the forefront of the drive to
beat the 2008 deadline.
Ekpo said about 80 per cent of associated gas -
the gas produced in the process of producing crude oil - in Nigeria had
been flared mainly because of lack of market for the gas, pointing out
that the figure had, however, dropped to about 50 per cent.
He explained that the figure was “still
sufficiently high to cause the international community to rate Nigeria as
one of the countries with the highest gas flaring rate,” adding that
flaring of gas had led to environmental degradation and economic losses
in Niger Delta.
He said: “Nigeria's solution to ending gas
flaring is to implement a number of projects aimed at utilising the gas”,
listing these to include gas
re-injection to enhance the recovery of more crude oil from oil wells,
liquefied natural gas (LNG) plants and their associated gas gathering and
transmission infrastructure, independent electric power plants, natural
gas liquids projects, the West African Gas Pipeline project to supply
Nigeria’s gas to Ghana, Togo and Benin Republic, the Escravos
Gas-to-Liquids Project, methanol projects, conversion of flared gas into
synthetic crude oil and the Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline project, planned
to take Nigeria’s gas directly to Europe, among others.
NETCO's contribution to these projects, Ekpo
stressed, had been significant, stating that since 1996, the company had
been actively involved in the execution of various projects for the
Nigeria LNG Plant, located at Bonny Island in Rivers State.
The involvement, he said, started on the base
project of the plant, which is the trains one and two, with the
deployment of six NETCO engineers of various disciplines to work in the
design offices of the project contractors, TSKJ in London, Paris and
Milan.
The assignments, according to him, lasted six
months. The same engineers were later deployed to the Bonny site for 12
months to carry out construction supervision activities, field
engineering activities and preparation of “as-built drawings’. In September 1998, NETCO was
again contracted to participate with TSKJ in the preparation of project
specification for the NLNG train three project. By April 1999, the firm
had acquired sufficient experience to be entrusted by TSKJ with the responsibility
for the detailed engineering of the condensate stabilisation unit of the
train three project. All the work was done in NETCO's Lagos office.
Besides that, Ekpo said the company executed
Soku Gas Plant debottle-necking project for the Shell Petroleum
Development Company of Nigeria Limited (SPDC).
NETCO prepared a detailed and sound cost
estimate that assisted SPDC in justifying its earlier cost projections.
The debottle-necking of the LNG gas supply plant at Soku was part of the
project being undertaken by SPDC in support of the government's flares-out policy,
he added.
In April 2004, NETCO
completed its participation with two Houston-based engineering companies,
Parsons and Aker Kvaerner, in the Front End Engineering Design of
ChevronTexaco's Escravos Gas Project (EGP) 3 project.
EGP 3 would help to increase the processing
capacity of the already completed and operational EGP 2 to 19.3 million
standard cubic metres of associated gas per day (scmd) or 680 million
standard cubic feet per day (scfd) - far more than the 285 scfd of gas
being processed by EGP 2. EGP 3 would enable ChevronTexaco to achieve the
mandatory no-flare deadline
of 2008.
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