Page 12 - AfrOil Week 06 2020

AfrOil POLICY AfrOil
 Sudan currently caps prices at below-market levels, with gasoline costing about $0.12 per litre and diesel around $0.08 per litre.
Officials in Khartoum said earlier this year that they wanted to phase the subsidies out slowly, over a period of 18 months beginning in March, and replace them with direct payments
in cash to impoverished citizens.
The shift would benefit the government,
which currently devotes about 36% of its budget to fuel price supports, but it could trigger unrest and street protests.
As such, Khartoum has yet to secure approval for its plans. ™
PROJECTS & COMPANIES
NLNG comments on plan to maximise local content in Train 7 project
NIGERIA
THE Nigeria LNG (NLNG) consortium is tout- ing its plan to maximise the use of local content in the design and construction of a new produc- tion train.
Speaking at an industry conference in Abuja on February 10, NLNG’s managing director and CEO Tony Attah said that Nigeria’s government had already approved its plans for the Train 7 project.
“Riding on the back of a robust Nigerian content plan endorsed by the Nigerian Content Development Monitoring Board (NCDMB), 55% of the engineering activities for Train 7 will be carried out in-country, and 55% of all pro- curement for execution of the project will be undertaken by Nigerian vendors,” he said.
Fully 100% of all installation and construc- tion work will be carried out in Nigeria, he noted.
According to Attah, this undertaking will bolster the country’s economy in many ways. The most obvious benefits will include “the cre- ation of jobs for our teeming youths, netting up to 12,000 direct jobs [during] the construction phase, as well as the associated skills acquisition through a deliberate effort at technology trans- fer,” he stated.
“[The] entire project will attract huge
[amounts of ] foreign direct investment [FDI] to the Nigerian economy,” he added. “Other benefits include the emergence of upstream and other associated projects that will bolster our economy.”
“The Train 7 initiative will give Nigeria a chance to show the world the full extent of its capabilities,” Attah commented. “For a Nige- rian company managed by [a] 100% Nigerian management team and [a] 95% indigenous workforce, it is a daunting test to [gain a repu- tation] as the first worldwide in plant reliability and the single most expansive LNG plant on the continent,” he said. “We can sustain this and do much more.”
NLNG’s largest shareholder is state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corp. (NNPC). Equity in the consortium is divided between NNPC (49%), Royal Dutch Shell (25.6%), France’s Total (15%) and Italy’s Eni (10.4%).
The consortium has been turning out LNG since 1999 and already has six production trains in place at its gas liquefaction plant on Bonny Island.
Together, these trains have a capacity of 22.5mn tonnes per year. The addition of Train
7 will push the total up by 7.2mn tpy, or 35%,
to 30mn tpy. 
The NLNG consortium made an FID on the Train 7 project last December (Photo: NLNG)
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