Nigeria breaks ground on NLNG Train 7
The international Nigeria LNG (NLNG) consortium held a ceremony on June 15 to mark the start of the construction of a seventh liquefaction train – a $10bn project the group sanctioned in December 2019.
Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari, who spoke at the ceremony via video link, hailed the event as "yet another very important milestone in the history of Nigeria's oil and gas industry."
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NLNG awarded engineering, procurement and construction contracts for Train 7 in May 2020 to Italy's Saipem, Japan's Chiyoda and South Korea's Daewoo. The project will raise Nigeria's liquefaction capacity from 22.5mn metric tons/year to 30mn mt/yr.
Nigeria has significant gas reserves but has been slow to expand its LNG capacity. NLNG, whose shareholders are state-owned NNPC (49%), Shell (25.6%), and Total (15%) and Eni (10.4%), launched their sixth train over a decade ago.
Nigerian company UTM Offshore recently commissioned studies for Nigeria's first floating LNG project, which will produce up to 1.2mn mt/yr of super-cooled gas. If built, the plant would bring an end to NLNG's monopoly over the country's LNG exports.