Nigeria’s state hydrocarbon company NNPC Ltd. has finally spud Ebenyi-A in Nasarawa State, four months after an elaborate ritual officially described as the “spudding event”. The company is also frantically working to spud the Wadi-B in Borno state, tentatively by the second week of August, 2023.
NNPC Ltd. had staged two events on the drill sites of the two wells that gave the impression that drilling had commenced.
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. In effect, 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.
The NNPC had described the ceremony as the spudding of the Ebenyi-A Well, the first in the Middle Benue Trough’.
NNPC’s press release reported at the time: “Speaking at the ‘spudding’ of the Ebenyi-A Well, President Muhammadu Buhari said the move was in line with the ongoing campaigns for the exploration of crude oil and gas in the nation’s frontier basins.
“The President listed the assets the nation intends 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 Ultra-Deepwater Niger Delta”.
Following similar, Presidential “kicking off” of Wadi-B well in Bornu State, NNPC was also presented with a technical disruption; heavy rains washed off the constructs of the drill site, such that the pre-drill infrastructure had to be reinstalled.
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 these 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 say. “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 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.
