Taking a big Bonga up north
25 Nov 2002
It took eight tugs to tow the hull of the Bonga, a floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) facility up England's River Tyne into a shipyard in Newcastle.
The Bonga itself is big. Very big, indeed. One might even use the word huge. Three hundred metres long, seventy five metres wide and the height of a twelve-storey building, it was constructed in South Korea and was towed 13,000 nautical miles to Newcastle at an average speed of five knots.
Now it is in Newcastle, the FPSO's topside modules will be installed, after which it will be towed to its permanent mooring at the Bonga field, 120 kilometres off the coast of the Niger Delta in Nigeria. Once there, it will be capable of producing 225,000 barrels of oil per day, exporting 150 million standard cubic feet of gas per day, and storing two million barrels of oil.
The Bonga project is initially expected to develop some 600-700 million barrels of Nigeria's crude oil. The field, which covers a surface area of 60 square kilometres, lies in a water depth of between 1,000 metres and 1,100 metres.
Shell Nigeria Exploration and Production Company Limited (SNEPCo) is operator of the Bonga oil and gas field development on behalf of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. Co-Venturers with SNEPCo (55%) are Esso Exploration and Production Nigeria (Deepwater) Limited (20%), Elf Petroleum Nigeria Limited (12.5%) and Nigerian Agip Exploration Limited (12.5%).
