NNPC ‘Spuds’ Nasarawa Well, Four Months After Ceremony — Report

The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC) has finally spud Ebenyi-A well in Nasarawa State, four months after it officially made the announcement.

Besides, the company is also frantically working to spud the Wadi-B in Borno state, tentatively by the second week of August, 2023, the Africa Oil & Gas Report said.

The national oil company had staged two events on the drill sites of the two wells that gave the impression that drilling had commenced, the report indicated.

“The spud date for Ebenyi-A, which means the date that the drilling actually began, was July 22, 2023, close to four months after the event at which former President Muhammadu Buhari ‘kicked off the exploratory drilling campaign’.

“The one-trimester of a year delay was largely due to logistical challenges thrown up by access to water required for drilling,” the report added.

It noted that President Buhari’s widely reported ‘kicking off of the exploratory drilling campaign”, on March 28, 2023, was at best ceremonial, as it did not translate to actual spudding the well.

Buhari had said the move was in line with the campaigns for the exploration of crude oil and gas in the nation’s frontier basins.

The former president listed the assets the nation intended to explore as those in the Chad Basin, Dahomey Basin, Anambra Platform, the Calabar Embankment, Sokoto Basin, Bida Basin, Benue Trough as well as the UltraDeepwater Niger Delta.

For Wadi-B well in Bornu State, NNPC, the report said. was also presented with a technical disruption; including heavy rains which washed off the constructs of the drill site, such that the pre-drill infrastructure had to be re-installed.

NNPC Ltd has carried out extensive geological mapping and geochemical sampling, as well as stress field surveys in several basins in the north of the country in the last six years.

Based on the results of the surveys, it acquires focused three dimensional (3D) seismic data, which is how it arrived at the specific drilling locations in Nasarawa.

“When we shoot 3Ds, we are prospect specific. It is not random”, NNPC insiders told the news medium. “If we make a find, we’d drill one or two appraisal wells and then offer the blocks up to the private sector for development,” the source added.

“The proposed Wadi-B drilling is the latest incarnation of the Chad basin campaign, in Nigeria’s far northeast, which has been on and off for the past 40 years.

“As head of state in February 1985, Muhammadu Buhari, then a serving Military General, visited a site of the (then) Chad Basin drilling. At the time, 22 wells had been drilled, with only two of them indicating hydrocarbon shows. Wadi-1 was one of those with such evidence, ” the report said.