Brazil’s Petrobras plans to return to Nigeria’s oil industry, to focus on deepwater exploration, Nigeria media have reported, citing a senior government official.
“We have not maximally capitalised on the fraternity between us and Brazil, but it is better late than never. The upcoming SDM [Strategic Dialogue Mechanism] presents an opportunity to execute sector-specific Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) and unlock investment flows,” Stanley Knwocha, a senior assistant with Nigeria’s vice president’s office, told Business Day.
“Petrobras is no longer active in Nigeria, but they are very keen on coming back to Nigeria. They said they want frontier acreage in deep waters,” Nigeria’s foreign minister said, as quoted by Reuters. The publication recalls that Brazil used to operate in the deepwater sector of Nigeria’s continental shelf some 30 years ago but a decade ago it sold its operations there to raise cash for growth at home.
Petrobras plans to spend $111 billion in the five years between 2025 and 2029, with $77 billion of this total earmarked for oil and gas exploration and production activities, the company said at the end of last year.
The new spending figure is $10 billion higher than an earlier version of the investment plan, where exploration and production spending was set at $73 billion. That earlier plan, in turn, was an upward revision on an even earlier version of the 2025-2029 budget that stood at $102 billion.
Most of this will be channeled into domestic operations, where the Brazilian major plans to expand its output mainly by boosting recovery rates at existing fields. However, billions will also be spent on new discoveries and, apparently, international expansion.
Nigeria, meanwhile, is looking for oil investors as it eyes a major boost in production. Lagos received some good news in this respect earlier this year, when Exxon announced it would spend $1.5 billion on deepwater oil and gas development in the West African producer.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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