Clearing of site and preparatory activities will begin at the proposed Federal Government-financed Ogidigben Industrial Park located in Delta State next month.

Indication to this effect emerged from the Group Executive Director, Gas & Power, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, Dr. David Ige, who addressed a gathering of members of the Association of Nigerian Petroleum Professionals Abroad at the ongoing Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, Texas, United State on Thursday.

Ige, who said contractors would move to the site for clearing in the next one month preparatory to actual construction, said, "Though this project is late relative to our timing, but we are making progress. Our plan is that between the next one month or two, we are going to move to site for site clearing and construction will begin.

"The Ogidigben Industrial Park will have a fertiliser plant, a petrochemical plant, a central processing facility and a power plant of 350-Megawatt capacity. There will be big commercial and residential areas. It is going to be the biggest gas-based industrial park in Africa."

The NNPC had recently said it would need about $15bn to develop a gas industrial park patterned after the Xenel Petrochemical Plant in Saudi Arabia and the Nagarjuna Fertiliser Plant in India.

Ige, during a presentation to the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission in Abuja in March, said NNPC was counting on the Federation Account as a veritable source of funding for the project.

He said the facility had been estimated to gulp between $15bn and $20bn in anticipated investment with additional investments in infrastructure and utilities to be provided by a special purpose vehicle constituted from willing investors and the Federal Government.

Ige, while speaking during the OTC on Thursday, reiterated the importance of the project to gas industrialisation in the country as well as the Nigerian Gas Master Plan.

He said the central processing unit and the fertiliser plant would be ready by 2017.

The intention of the project, he insisted, was to have a purpose-built gas industrial city for the utilisation of the country's gas resources and stimulation of gas related industries.

Ige cited the non-passage of the Petroleum Industry Bill, insecurity, community relations issues as well as huge human capital and capacity deficit as the challenges affecting the project.

When completed, he said the project would stimulate geographically dispersed industrialisation of Nigeria and unprecedented job creation estimated at over five million jobs across the entire value chain in the upstream, midstream and downstream sub-sectors.

http://odili.net/news/source/2013/may/11/806.html

This is very nice and hope they can speed up work on this project.