BP to develop 15 trillion-cubic-foot West African gas field

Dec. 24 (UPI) -- BP has made a final investment decision to move ahead with the first phase of the project to develop the Greater Tortue Ahmeyin gas field located in ultradeep waters shared by Senegal and Mauritania.

The project involves extraction of the gas from a floating production storage platform that will ship the fuel to a floating liquefied natural gas facility near the shores of the Mauritania and Senegal maritime border, BP said.

"The floating LNG facility is designed to provide circa 2.5 million tons of LNG per annum on average, with the total gas resources in the field estimated to be around 15 trillion cubic feet," BP said Friday. First gas is expected in 2022.

"We see a great deal of potential in the wider basin and Phase 1 of the Greater Tortue Ahmeyim project is the first step in unlocking that for the future," said Emma Delaney, BP's regional president for West Africa.

Phase 1 of the project involves finalizing agreements and obtaining final regulatory and contract approvals. Once that is completed, the project will move into design and construction.

BP said the decision came after agreements with the governments of Mauritania and Senegal, as well as with partner Kosmos Energy. BP has been selected as the sole buyer of all the LNG.

According to its website, Kosmos Energy was founded in 2003 to find oil in underexplored parts of the word. The company's discoveries include the 2007 finding of the Jubilee field offshore Ghana, which it developed in only 42 months, and is estimated to contain some 600 million barrels of oil.

LNG is mostly methane with some ethane content that is processed in a cryogenic facility so that the natural gas is compressed to reduce its volume by 600 times. This makes it easy to transport by ship to parts of the world with high energy demand.