Development work accelerates

The five producing fields in the Gulf of Guinea’s deep-water areas – two off Angola, two off Equatorial Guinea and one off Nigeria – will become eight by the end of next year and 13 a year or so later. Deep-water fields under development will add nearly 1.8m b/d to the region’s production capacity – with more to come from the projects being planned, Martin Quinlan writes

THE DEEP-WATER areas of the Gulf of Guinea have been described as an explorer's dream, but a development engineer's nightmare. The dream phase, starting in the mid-1990s, saw the discovery of giant fields of mostly good-quality oil - in some blocks, with hardly any dry wells. The nightmare phase involves implementing huge development projects in a remote region with poor infrastructure, a shortage of skills and a history of political instability. These difficulties are behind the strong preference for floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessels in the development schemes of the region's deep-water fields. FPSOs are constructed and fitted-out in specialist yards and can start p