Oil Explorers Celebrate Decade of Deepwater Drilling in Nigeria
By Mike Oduniyi
The Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists (NAPE ) in collaboration with the American Association of Petroleum Geologists(AAPG), will be hosting an international conference on deepwater exploration and production in West Africa at the Sheraton Hotel in Abuja from November 14 to 18 in Abuja.
The Conference will be preceded, as usual, by a pre-conference workshop which will take place this time in Lagos. The one day workshop, scheduled for October 19, is entitled �A Decade of Deepwater Activities in Nigeria, Gains, Prospects and Challenges."
"In the next four years, the percentage of deepwater production in Nigeria's total production will rise. We want to know what the nation stands to benefit," Mr. Gilbert Odior, NAPE President Elect and Chairman, Conference Organising Committee, said.
We also would evaluate what we have done in this area in the last 10 years; have we got the strategy right: from exploration to financing," said Odior.
The pre-conference workshop provides a good precursor to thje overall regional question that the conference proper will address.
The conference itself, entitled: NAPE/AAPG West Africa Regional Deepwater Conference, aims to share lessons learnt in the last several years of exploration and production in the countries with coastal basins along the south atlantic, including Cote D�Ivoire, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Gabon, SaoTome and Pricipe, Angola, and northwards in Senegal , Mauritania, Morrocco, in the hope that we can leverage such knowledge for immediate and future exploration and production of oil and gas in the region.
NAPE said the conference comes at a time when the petroleum world is acknowledging that the largest discoveries of oil and gas in the last five years have taken place in deepwater West Africa.
"In a nutshell, West Africa is the flavour of the month on the oil patch."
"Whereas the conference will be preoccupied with technical challenges in the wider region, the discussions at the pre-conference workshop will centre mainly on Nigeria.
Here, the topics will be broad-based and involve more than geologists and petroleum engineers.'
Participants from the oil industry, the banks, the legal circles as well as industry will look at how Nigerians, Nigeria and her partners have benefited and still hope to benefit from investment in deepwater since the first set of tracts were awarded in 1993. Issues such as fiscal strategy, local content, indigenous participation will be treated along with technical challenges.
"The communique from this multi-stakeholder workshop will be handed over to President Olusegun Obasanjo on the opening day of the conference proper, on November 14, 2004 in Abuja," NAPE said.
The Deepwater province refers to offshore areas with water depth ranging from at least 200metres to as deep as 3,000metres offshore. Until last year when Agip�s Abo field became the first to come on stream, Nigeria�s production was limited to 150 metre water depth.
The NAPE/AAPG West Africa Regional Deepwater Conference is the first such major collaboration between a local body of oil and gas professionals with the largest society of earth scientists (AAPG) in the world.
More than 2,500 delegates are expected at the five-day event. An average participant will spend seven days in Nigeria, of which four are for the conference proper.
The conference will feature 150 oral and poster presentations in 20 technical sessions and has earmarked a day for roundtable discussion of strategy and Impact of oilfield activity on Global economies by ranking executives of major companies operating in the region.
Delegates are coming from those countries with coastal basins jutting right on the Atlantic: South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Nigeria,, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Ghana, Cote d�Ivoire, Mauritania and Morocco. As this significant hydrocarbon province has generated technical and intellectual interest all over the world, delegates are also coming from countries like Brazil as well the United States.
AAPG is collaborating excitedly with NAPE in part because the latter is its major affiliate in West Africa, but more importantly because Nigeria is the most significant oil producer along the Gulf of Guinea.
The West African deepwater play is the most successful exploration play in the world in the last 10 years. More than 10 billion barrels of oil have been discovered in the deepwater segment of the six basins that lie the Atlantic Coast from Mauritania in the North to Namibia in the Southwest. Nigeria alone has contributed more than four billion barrels.
The success of deepwater exploration has led to commitment of more than $12 billion of worth of field development in Nigeria alone in the next five years. Insights into the technological challenges of producing these fields are part of the lessons to be captured at the conference.
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