Nigeria LNG’s long wait looks to be over

FID on a long-awaited expansion of the Nigeria LNG project looms. But the nation’s dreams of being a premier league producer have faded, at least for now

The buzz in the LNG community a little over a decade ago—when it was becoming increasingly clear that Qatar would become the dominant force in global LNG by 2010—centred on which country might become ‘the next Qatar’. In these pre-US shale gas revolution days, the two favoured contenders were Australia and Nigeria.  “Between 1999 and 2006 we were deemed the fastest-growing LNG company in the world,” says Tony Attah, CEO of Nigeria LNG (NLNG), “because almost every 18 months we were adding a [liquefaction] train.”  NLNG’s rate of progress was certainly rapid. The project’s first train – Train 2 as it turned out ­– started up in 1999 and by 2007 six trains were up and running (see fig.1), with