The joint finance team of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), together with its Joint Venture (JV) partners, Chevron Nigeria Limited (CNL), has been awarded the prestigious Thomson Reuters/PFI Magazine “Africa and Middle East Oil Deal of the Year Award 2015’’.
The Corporation, in a statement released Wednesday, and signed by Ohi Alegbe, its group general manager, group public affairs division, said that the award is in recognition of the novel $1.2 billion multi-year drilling financing package for 36 offshore/onshore oil wells under the NNPC/CNL Joint Venture,
“It honours the government oil giant for conceptualizing, structuring and delivering an oversubscribed deal in a challenging macro-economic environment,” the statement read.
Codenamed Project Cheetah, the $1.2 billion alternative financing package was the first to combine funding of both oil and domestic gas production from carefully sequenced offshore and onshore wells to support power generation in Nigeria.
The deal is projected to fund 36 wells and deliver 41, 000 barrels of crude oil per day, with a projected peak incremental production of 127 million standard cubic feet of gas per day (mmscfd) in the years ahead.
It is also expected to generate between $2 to 5 billion of incremental revenues to the Nigerian government over its lifespan, subject to prevailing oil price in the coming years.
The deal was initiated under the Accelerated Upstream Financing Programme, which was executed in London at a signing ceremony in September 2015.
The initiative was designed by NNPC to address the perennial challenge experienced by the Federal Government in providing its counterpart funding of JV upstream projects.
The project is being financed by a consortium of Nigerian and International lenders, led by Standard Chartered Bank and the United Bank for Africa (UBA).
The global award, which is one of the most prestigious in the international financing market, is based on feedback from peers and market operators, with full endorsement by judges at Thomson Reuters /PFI.
– Source: The Will
