Nigeria deepwater lifts TechnipFMC

Nigeria’s Bonga North deepwater project featured prominently as French engineering group TechnipFMC posted a robust set of Q4 2024 results

The company announced back in December that it had secured work on the deepwater project, worth between US$250mn and US$500mn, which is being put together by a local unit of Shell.

The contract — awarded by Shell Nigeria Exploration and Production Company Limited — will see TechnipFMC supply Subsea 2.0 production systems for the Bonga North development, with work covering the design and manufacture of subsea tree systems, manifolds, jumpers, controls and other services.

But the company also highlighted “higher activity” generally in Africa behind the success of its subsea division during the quarterly period.

It saw the company’s total order backlog reach US$14.4bn, an increase of 9% on a year earlier, with full-year orders worth US$10.4bn. The company said it anticipates a similar order book for 2025.

Doug Pferdehirt, chair and chief executive of TechnipFMC, called it “another year of tremendous success” for the group.

TechnipFMC also reported strong growth across the Middle East region.

“We have secured US$20.2bn of subsea orders over the past two years, and our strong market visibility gives us confidence we will exceed US$10bn of inbound in the current year — delivering on our guidance of US$30bn over the three-years ending 2025,” he said.

Pferdehirt also said that the outlook for further subsea work was positive, a potential nod to the wave of offshore projects in Africa currently in the planning, in areas ranging from Tanzania and Mozambique to Namibia.

“We are also experiencing increased visibility into the pipeline of longer-term opportunities, supported by a growing list of named projects that extends beyond the historical planning horizon, giving us even greater confidence that activity will remain robust through the end of the decade.”

Other frontier provinces have provided opportunity as well, with TechnipFMC landing US$1bn worth of work on the GranMorgu project, the first oil and gas development offshore Suriname.

Shell’s Bonga North development off Nigeria will be a subsea tie-back to the Bonga floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) facility, located in block OML 118, in water depths over 1,000 metres.

It includes drilling, completing and starting up 16 wells (eight production wells and eight water injection wells), modifications to the existing FPSO and the installation of new subsea hardware tied back to the facility.

Bonga North currently has an estimated recoverable resource volume of more than 300 million barrels of oil equivalent (boe) and will reach a peak production of 110,000 barrels of oil a day, with first oil anticipated by the end of the decade.

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