Total's Usan project comes on stream 10 years after discovery.
The French oil major announced the start-up of it's deep offshore project in Nigeria on schedule and becomes the second major Total project in the Usan to begin operations.
The Dalia FPSO vessel can store 2m barrels of crude Image: BP |
Around 100km off the South Nigerian Coast, the oil lies beneath up to 850m of water as part of Total's OML138 Block and the latest project involves a spread of 42 wells connected to a floating vessel by 70km of undersea networks.
The vessel itself, one of the largest Floating Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) platforms in the world, is critical to estimated output of around 180,000b/d of crude, with a storage capacity of 2m barrels.
Since it's discovery in 2002, Total has been developing the field using 60% of local resourced labour and resources, including 500,000 engineering and 14 million construction and installation resource-hours for the project. The Block is operated by Total E&P Nigeria Ltd, along with Nigerian divisions of Chevron, Esso and Nexen. The concession holder for the field is the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation.
Acording to Total, the Usan field includes a number of environmentally positive innovations including a solution to "drastically reduce" the amount of gas flaring.