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Nigeria's President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has pledged his full support to the consortium partners developing the country's first floating liquefied natural gas plant (FLNG).

“We have abundance of gas on the ground however, the extractive industry needs the injection of your kind of partnership to be able to promote growth. It is a must [project] for any government to support. Let me know if there are any bottlenecks, we will break them,” the president said during an audience with project developers at the State House in Abuja on 5 July.

Lagos-based UTM Offshore is leading the development of the estimated US$5 billion FLNG facility in collaboration with LNG Investment Management Services (LIMS), a subsidiary of Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).

The plant will have the capacity to process 176 million standard cubic feet of gas a day, producing about 1.2 million tonnes a year of LNG. It will be fed with associated gas currently being flared at the Yoho field. The facility is planned to come onstream by the fourth quarter of 2026.

Briefing the president, Julius Rone, managing director and CEO, UTM Offshore said the project aligns with President Tinubu’s promise to develop Nigerian gas resources as a source of sustainable energy and economic development for the country.

In November, UTM Offshore signed a contract with the UK's Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), Japan Gas Corporation (JGC) and France's Technip Energies to carry out the front-end engineering design (FEED) for the project. The FEED is expected to take 10 months to complete.

UTM Offshore signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Afreximbank to finance the FLNG plant in December 2021.

Once completed, the plant will have a turret and mooring system, gas pre-treatment modules, LNG production modules, living quarters, self-contained power generation and other utilities as well as LNG storage and offloading capabilities.

A second FLNG plant is planned in Nigeria. In May, it was reported that Norway's Golar LNG had signed an MoU with NNPC.

Photo: LNG carrier (© Oleksandr Kalinichenko | Dreamstime)