Madu is expected to average 20,000 bpd, NNPC said in a press release. It is part of Oil Mining Lease (OML) 85, an area in shallow waters off Bayelsa State operated by FIRST Exploration & Petroleum Development Co. Ltd. (FIRST E&P).
“Madu Oil Field has significant oil, gas, and condensate resources in multiple-stacked reservoirs”, FIRST E&P said in a separate announcement. It sits 23 kilometers northwest of the Anyala field under OML 83, which is also held by the NNPC-FIRST E&P joint venture. FIRST E&P operates both licenses with a 40 percent working stake.
FIRST E&P expects Madu and Anyala to ramp up to a combined 60,000 bpd. The two fields are estimated to hold 581 million stock tank barrels of oil and 1.11 trillion cubic feet of gas, according to information from the operator's website.
Oil from Madu is processed at the joint venture’s Abigail-Joseph floating production storage and offloading facility, which can store up to 800,000 barrels of petroleum, NNPC said.
Meanwhile, Awoba, the second startup announced in Nigeria in days, restarted production at an initial rate of 8,000 bpd, NNPC said in another news release. Production is expected to scale up to as much as 12,000 bpd within a few weeks.
“Besides the recent start of production at the Madu Field by the NNPC Ltd/First E&P JV, the company has achieved the restart of production at OMLs 29 and OML 18 in late 2023 which have steadily contributed an average of 60,000bpd to the nation’s production output since their restart”, NNPC said announcing the Awoba restart.
Awoba, operated by Newcross Exploration & Production Ltd. through OML 24, shut down February 2022 “due to evacuation issues and crude oil theft”, while its last supply to the Bonny oil and gas terminal was in 2021, NNPC recalled. The OML 24 area is in the mangrove swamp south of Rivers State’s Port Harcourt, where a refinery processes oil from the terminal.
Awoba is expected to “significantly boost gas supply to the power sector and other gas-based industries”, NNPC said.
Oil supply to the Port Harcourt refinery recently resumed, when Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Ltd. delivered 475,000 barrels, as announced by the Shell PLC subsidiary February 12.
“The crude supply resumed early in the year after a prolonged outage of over five years, during which time the refinery underwent rehabilitation and integrity activities on its supply pipeline from the terminal”, Shell said at the time.
The refinery has a total crude distillation capacity of 210,000 bpd at two plants, according to online information from the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) in Abuja. The older of the two was built 1965 while the second was built 1989.
NNPC has rolled out a two-phase, $1.5-billion rehabilitation project for the refinery, according to information from NNPC. Phase one targets to put the complex onstream at a 60 percent utilization rate while the second phase involves raising the utilization rate to 90 percent, according to a report from the Nigerian Television Authority March 22, 2019.
The NNPC reported December 21, 2023, rehabilitation reached 77.4 percent completion as of the time. Full operation is targeted 2024.
“We want to be at the highest level of production so that we will keep the prices of petroleum prices in the country stable in order to give comfort to our people and generate more revenue for our country”, NNPC board chair Pius Akinyelure said at the time.
