Shell ships first crude cargo from Bonga

ABUJA – Royal Dutch Shell shipped 200 000 barrels of crude oil from Nigeria’s Bonga, the first cargo from the deepwater oil and gas field which started producing in November, a Nigerian arm of Shell said yesterday.

The company said the shipment involved the pressurised transfer of crude from the Bonga Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessel to the offshore loading buoy and onto the ocean-going tanker. “Some 200 000 barrels of crude were loaded on board the vessel Arion,which completed off take at about 13:30 hours on December 29 2005, before departing the field,” the Shell Nigeria Exploration and Production Company (SNEPCO) said in a statement.The statement did not say where the cargo was headed.Oil production at Bonga is expected to ramp up to some 200 000 barrels per day (bpd) in 2006, SNEPCO said.The firm said Bonga’s offshore loading buoy was the world’s first, largest and most technologically advanced polyester moored deepwater buoy.The transfer to the offshore buoy was done via a nearly 2,5-kilometre-long dynamic flexible pipe, SNEPCO said.”It is a technological triumph that Shell is successfully producing oil and gas from Nigeria’s deepwater frontier and we have capped that achievement with today’s first shipment,” SNEPCO’s Managing Director Chima Ibeneche said.Bonga started production in late November after repeated delays and cost overruns.It cost some US$3,6 billion to develop, up from an initial US$2,7 billion estimate, and startup came more than two years after Shell’s original target date.Bonga is the first of a series of large-scale deepwater projects set to provide the bulk of Nigeria’s forecast growth in oil production from 2,4 million bpd to four million bpd by 2010.-Nampa-Reuters”Some 200 000 barrels of crude were loaded on board the vessel Arion,which completed off take at about 13:30 hours on December 29 2005, before departing the field,” the Shell Nigeria Exploration and Production Company (SNEPCO) said in a statement.The statement did not say where the cargo was headed.Oil production at Bonga is expected to ramp up to some 200 000 barrels per day (bpd) in 2006, SNEPCO said.The firm said Bonga’s offshore loading buoy was the world’s first, largest and most technologically advanced polyester moored deepwater buoy.The transfer to the offshore buoy was done via a nearly 2,5-kilometre-long dynamic flexible pipe, SNEPCO said.”It is a technological triumph that Shell is successfully producing oil and gas from Nigeria’s deepwater frontier and we have capped that achievement with today’s first shipment,” SNEPCO’s Managing Director Chima Ibeneche said.Bonga started production in late November after repeated delays and cost overruns.It cost some US$3,6 billion to develop, up from an initial US$2,7 billion estimate, and startup came more than two years after Shell’s original target date.Bonga is the first of a series of large-scale deepwater projects set to provide the bulk of Nigeria’s forecast growth in oil production from 2,4 million bpd to four million bpd by 2010.-Nampa-Reuters