₦airaland Forum

Dutch company, SBM Offshore on Wednesday announced that it has been awarded contracts to perform Front End Engineering and Design (FEED) for a Floating Production, Storage and Offloading vessel (FPSO) for the Yellowtail oil extraction project offshore Guyana.

A release from SBM said that the FEED contract award triggers the initial release of funds by ExxonMobil’s subsidiary Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited (EEPGL) to begin FEED activities and secure a Fast4Ward® hull.

The release said that following FEED and subject to government approvals in Guyana of the development plan, project sanction including final investment decision by ExxonMobil, and EEPGL’s release of the second phase of work, SBM Offshore will construct, install and then lease the FPSO and operate it for a period of up to two years. First oil from the Yellowtail well is expected in 2025.

SBM Offshore, the release said, will design and construct the FPSO using its industry leading Fast4Ward® programme allocating the Company’s sixth new build, Multi-Purpose Hull combined with several standardized topsides modules.

“The FPSO will be designed to produce 250,000 barrels of oil per day, will have associated gas treatment capacity of 450 million cubic feet per day and water injection capacity of 300,000 barrels per day. The FPSO will be spread moored in water depth of about 1,800 meters and will be able to store around 2 million barrels of crude oil”, the release said..

This will be the fourth FPSO that SBM will build for operations in Guyana’s waters.

“Building on the experience to date on the Liza Destiny, Liza Unity and Prosperity FPSOs, SBM Offshore continues to commit to local content development in Guyana through sourcing fabrication scope locally and the integration of Guyanese engineers in the execution and operational teams”, the company said.

Liza Destiny has been producing oil here since December 2019, The Liza Unity is now in Guyana’s waters and being connected to begin extraction next year. The Prosperity, for the Payara well, is now in dry dock in Singapore.

In order to strengthen its execution model given the current challenging market environment, SBM Offshore said in the release that it has established a special purpose company (SPC) with McDermott for the execution of the turnkey phase of the project. This SPC will benefit from the combined engineering and fabrication capacity as well as the experience of the two companies in delivering EPC solutions to the energy industry. SBM Offshore will hold 70% and McDermott will hold 30% equity ownership in this SPC. The FPSO will be fully owned by SBM Offshore.

Bruno Chabas, SBM Offshore’s Chief Executive Officer was quoted as saying in the press release:

“SBM Offshore is proud to announce ExxonMobil has awarded the contracts for the fourth FPSO to be deployed in Guyana. When finished, the FPSO will be the largest producing unit ever built by the Company. This project again demonstrates the value that our industry leading Fast4Ward® program continues to bring to our clients and other stakeholders. We are also pleased to announce our partnership with McDermott and look forward to working together through the execution phase and deliver this world class project.”

The release said that McDermott is a premier, fully-integrated provider of engineering and construction solutions to the energy industry. Operating in over 54 countries, McDermott’s locally-focused and globally-integrated resources include more than 30,000 employees, a diversified fleet of specialty marine construction vessels and fabrication facilities, the release said.

SBM’s main activities are the design, supply, installation, operation and the life extension of floating production solutions for the offshore energy industry over the full lifecycle. As of December 31, 2020, the release said that the Company employs approximately 4,570 people worldwide spread over offices in our key markets, operational shore bases and the offshore fleet of vessels.

https://www.stabroeknews.com/2021/11/19/news/guyana/exxon-awards-key-contracts-for-fourth-oil-platform/amp/

oseremenifidon:
Well, congratulations but wondering how you did yours ooo.

He might have better finances and/or education background.

Halcyon123:
Butter pie,found the recipe online and I just had to try it and I love it. Great for snacking

Is this with potato and onion or something else?

King Richard

Good film. One of my favorite scenes was when he hit the thug with a racquet. I hope they make a sequel that picks up where it left off, showing us the early years.

It's actually wild that most people don't know their father made them what they are.

Most people have no desire to do the job long term because the schedule is unpredictable and they have to be away from family.

Power has little meaning other than protection.

Being an innovative country (with adequate protection) is far greater.

.......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAwwYh5f3go

New stuff from MFR Souls. So good.

..........

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsIqvAavmE4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXr1JFS9GYk

......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-v_LjxhfJ0

........

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGjjBUqSoig

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNqM2u-oxKE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcnmCHTO7p4

......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6eFifPFZxg

Seychelles & Senegal

The Biden administration sanctioned Eritrea's military and its sole political party for their involvement in the ongoing crisis in northern Ethiopia as Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed concern that about "the potential for Ethiopia to implode."

These are the first sanctions imposed under a new executive order signed by President Joe Biden to target those responsible for perpetrating the year-long conflict, which has intensified over recent weeks as armed groups allied against the Ethiopian government have advanced south toward the capital of Addis Ababa.

In addition to designating the Eritrean Defense Force (EDF) and People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), the Biden administration also sanctioned two individuals and two entities with ties to the EDF and PFDJ.

Friday's sanctions did not target any individuals or organizations directly associated with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government nor the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), both of which are key parties to the conflict.

In a statement Friday, Blinken said they were not imposing such sanctions in order "to allow time and space" to see if diplomatic efforts led by African Union High Representative Olusegun Obasanjo make progress.

"If the parties fail to make meaningful progress, the United States stands ready to pursue additional sanctions, including against the Government of Ethiopia and the TPLF," said Blinken, who travels to Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal next week.

US Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa Jeffrey Feltman, who was in Addis Ababa this week, returned to Washington, DC Thursday "to consult with the Secretary of State and other senior Administration officials on the US diplomatic efforts to promote a negotiated and sustainable cessation of hostilities and an end to the conflict," a State Department spokesperson said.

Blinken said that "Eritrea's destabilizing presence in Ethiopia is prolonging the conflict, posing a significant obstacle to a cessation of hostilities, and threatening the integrity of the Ethiopian state."

"Credible accounts implicate Eritrean forces in serious human rights abuses, and the United States remains gravely concerned about the conduct of all parties to the conflict. Eritrean forces should immediately withdraw from Ethiopia," he said.

The US Treasury Department said the EDF "has been operating in northern Ethiopia amidst numerous reports of looting, sexual assault, killing civilians, and blocking humanitarian aid."

"EDF soldiers have been seen disguised in old Ethiopian military uniforms, manning checkpoints, obstructing and occupying critical aid routes, and threatening medical staff in one of northern Ethiopia's few operating hospitals," the Department said in a press release.

The details described by the Treasury Department echo CNN's reporting from earlier this year, when a team traveling through Tigray "witnessed Eritrean soldiers, some disguising themselves in old Ethiopian military uniforms, manning checkpoints, obstructing and occupying critical aid routes, roaming the halls of one of the region's few operating hospitals and threatening medical staff."

The humanitarian situation in northern Ethiopia remains dire, and multiple United Nations personnel have been detained in recent days.

Additional CNN reporting has uncovered atrocities that bear the hallmarks of genocide, including mass killings and sexual violence. A joint report released by the Office of UN Commissioner for Human Rights and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission found that all parties involved in the conflict had "committed violations of international human rights, humanitarian and refugee law, some of which may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity."

In addition to the sanctions on the EDF, the US targeted the PFDJ, Eritrea's "sole legal political party," according to a Treasury Department release.

Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki "personally oversees the command and control of the EDF, issuing orders directly to EDF generals, making him ultimately responsible for the EDF's role in contributing to the crisis in northern Ethiopia," the Treasury Department said.

The administration also sanctioned Red Sea Trading Corporation, which "manages the property and financial interests of the PFDJ, acts as its funder, and provides it business assistance," as well as its CEO Hagos Ghebrehiwet W Kidan; Abraha Kassa Nemariam, the head of the Eritrean National Security Office; and Hidri Trust, "the holding company of all PFDJ business enterprises."

Blinken said Friday that the sanctions "are not directed at the people of Eritrea, Ethiopia, or the greater Horn of Africa Region; they are calibrated to impose costs on those prolonging the crisis."

"The US Department of the Treasury has taken a series of steps to permit the continued flow of food, medicine, and humanitarian support to Eritrea," he said.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/12/politics/biden-admin-ethiopia-eritrea-sanctions/index.html

They're trying to mask their involvement. No one is fooled.

crazyABO:
Moved in from California...now base in new york

Congratulations on joining civilization.

What exactly do you want to do?

APOSTLECHUMA:
Remove Igbos and Yorubas from Nigeria and Nigeria will be a country with great international reputation, attracting heavy foreign investors.

Nigeria doesn't need investors. It needs to purge the foreign-backed politicians and terrorists.

lol Listen, European nations loot Africa every day. She's returning the favor.

Even if these houses are given away, it has no real impact.

If they were out to help people, these would be small buildings, and they would be selling condos well below market price. They would also purpose build common commercial spaces into them and also put up a few all commercial buildings, and either let people use those spaces free for a certain period, or lease them well below market rate.

anu3:
Wonder how online stealing has become so popular in Africa (especially in Nigeria and Ghana) with flimsy Excuses, taking advantage of English language.

When we engage in any form of Stealing, we can sure the condition is one of "Everyday for the thief, One day for the owner" type.

Why is it popular in India, Russia, China, all of eastern Europe, or some other place?

Last time I checked, yáhoo boys didn't invent it. Relax with the racist propaganda.

bigcee:
You're right but I was having difficulty positioning the clipper to get the right fading I really wanted. It's not that easy . Thank you

There are plenty of people who aren't fussy about their haircut. You could offer free cuts, so you get more practice.

At the time that cities were being set up, hygienist and eugenic ideals populated the imagination and experiences of those responsible for creating public policies and organizing urban spaces. In Santarém’s view, racist mobility continues at work in building tools for segregation, which can show itself in various forms. He gives various examples: “The way I look or the attacks I will suffer in the streets; my territory being more precarious; my getting on the bus, having less income and not having access to bus vouchers; or, my being on the bus and bouncing all over the place; or, being on the bus and people not sitting next to me; the bus not stopping for me; or, the train not going where I need it to go, or when it does, having terrible infrastructure, one that is much more susceptible to accidents… That’s it. All aspects of mobility have a link with racism,” Paique Santarém concludes.

“The metrics that determine transport calculations are based on the dehumanization of our bodies,” reflected Rafaela Albergaria at the beginning of her address. The researcher recalled the death of her cousin, Joana Bonifácio, who was dragged and killed after having her leg stuck in the train door as she tried to board it. According to Albergaria, her view of urban mobility comes from a struggle for reparations: “It has to do with remembrance, with thinking about the fight for justice and the guarantee of non-repetition. I always talk about Joana because remembering, and exercising the memory of those who came before us, and who were important to us, is also a political production of existence and life.” Based on the understanding that a social problem is only targeted by public policies once mapped, Rafaela started to collect data and talk to people who use the trains, thus initiating the research that would result in the book It Wasn’t In Vain: Mobility, Inequality, and Safety on Rio’s Metropolitan Trains.

In the researcher’s understanding, racism operates through a policy of interdiction as opposed to a policy of access, having a eugenic perspective of organizing the public space as its starting point. She argues that, “White bodies access institutions from a place of guaranteed (rights). Black bodies access institutions and public spaces from a place of interdiction… Which bodies will access cities and rights? What are the bodies that will access the city from a standpoint of interdiction, control, and extermination?”

According to Albergaria, the eugenic theories and policies that fostered the construction of cities show their effects on the conditions of the access of black and low-income populations to cities, opportunities, and rights.

Albergaria believes that this access, permeated by deep inequalities, is heightened by the absence of reparations policies in the post-slavery period. Also according to her, what were actually observed were numerous policies created to maintain or even accentuate the precarious conditions of life and survival of black people. This logic of differentiating and establishing hierarchies manifests itself in all spheres of life, including transit. Albergaria draws attention to the impacts of this on people’s daily lives. “If you want to access any social policy, you need to get around the city. If you want to go to the health center, which is close to your house, you need to get around. The mobility policy is decisive for our existence.”

If survival is directly influenced by one’s ability to transit through the city, then we must fight to rework the policies and logic from which mobility operates. About this, Paique Santarém alludes to the transformations that have taken place in universities in recent years: “The Brazilian public university is a racist institution… but, today, it has effective affirmative action policies. Is that enough? No, but it’s creating spaces for Afro-Brazilians to fight for more within universities, knowing that the university will only be anti-racist when it is refounded. But it does have anti-racist policies within its walls. So, we can institute anti-racist policies in transport, knowing that mobility is a racist institution. I think that’s the direction we have to work in.”

Regarding this subject, Albergaria also defends the construction of affirmative action for transit, based on concrete experiences. According to the researcher, the gap existing between mobility policies and the needs of the black population, is supported, on the one hand, by intentional projects of interdiction and control though they also result from the lack of materiality of the problems for those who have the power to change this scenario. In other words, the fact that those who control policies and resources do not experience the problems of lack of access that banish black and low-income people from the city serves to exacerbate this abyss.

“People decide on public policies based on their materiality… we only dream of what is visible to us. Nobody dreams of what they don’t even know exists. We only dream and only build from that place [that we can imagine]. That, in itself, dismantles the thinking of universality that many white people assume exists, which doesn’t reproduce itself only with thoughts, but also with policies,” says Rafaela. So, if decision-making spaces are mostly occupied by white people, “they will prioritize investing the budget they control in what is visible to them. They’re not going to think and elaborate on the demands of Jardim Gramacho when they’ve never set foot there. They will not prioritize the train when they’ve never been inside a station, when the most they’ve used in terms of public transport is the subway,” defended Rafaela Albergaria.

The various intersections between race, racism and mobility were addressed over three meetings promoted in October by ITDP. The idea is to debate the theme from researchers and black activists, who work on the topic of transport and access to the city. Check back next week for coverage of the second meeting.

https://rioonwatch.org/?p=68040

This is the first of three articles that cover the roundtable discussions of the the Color of Mobility project. It is also the latest contribution to our year-long reporting project, “Rooting Anti-Racism in the Favelas: Deconstructing Social Narratives About Racism in Rio de Janeiro.” Follow our Rooting Anti-Racism in the Favelas series here.

“Why does urban mobility need to be anti-racist?” This question was the subject of a roundtable held on October 13 by the Institute for Transport and Development Policy (ITDP), in partnership with the São Paulo Association of Urban Cyclists (Ciclocidade) and Pedal in the Hood. Participants reflected on the difficulties and inequalities that permeate the experience of Afro-Brazilians with urban mobility.

This was the first in a series of three meetings that make up the actions of the Color of Mobility project, which aims to bring awareness to the effects of racism on how the black population transits through cities. This first roundtable included Rafaela Albergaria and Paíque Santarém, authors of the book Anti-Racist Mobility, and ITDP communications coordinator, Mariana Brito, who moderated the conversation.

This October, ITDP Brazil and @ciclocidade will promote three meet-ups to discuss and reflect on how structural racism affects the access, supply and rendering of public transport services offered in Brazil.

With a master’s in Social Work, Albergaria is a researcher in the areas of Human Rights, Public Policy, Urban Mobility, and Institutional Racism. In 2019 she published It Wasn’t In Vain: Mobility, Inequality, and Safety on Rio’s Metropolitan Trains, co-authored with João Pedro Martins and Vitor Mihessen. The work is the result of extensive research on train-pedestrian fatalities on SuperVia trains, which serve Greater Rio de Janeiro. One of the stories told is that of Joana Bonifácio. Bonifácio was Albergaria’s cousin, who died at the age of 19 trying to board a train at the Coelho da Rocha Station, in Greater Rio’s Baixada Fluminense region, in the municipality of São João de Meriti. Her cousin’s death made the close relationship between race and the precariousness of rail transport and, more broadly, the influence of racism on urban mobility, jump out to the researcher.

A member of the Free Fare Movement and of the Black Movement, anthropologist Paique Duques Santarém is a doctoral candidate in Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Brasília (UNB). The relationship between racism and the structuring of urban mobility in the country is at the center of his analysis as a researcher. As Santarém argued during the event, racist mobility “is a concept born from life experience, a real lived experience.”

The meeting began with an invitation for those present to participate: “When you think about anti-racist mobility, what is the first word that comes to mind?” From this provocation, those present indicated terms that relate to the topic. Equality, equity, law, and inequality were the words most used.

Borrowing a few verses from the poem “Passenger from the last railcar,” by Elisa Lucinda, which opens the book Anti-Racist Mobility, Mariana Brito hinted at what would be discussed:

[redacted]

The relationship between racism and urban mobility can be seen from different perspectives. At the base of this problem is the strangeness of racism within institutions, its influence on the organization of spaces, in the hierarchy and differentiation of people, and in the establishment of public policies. Quoting Frantz Fanon, Santarém explains that “racism is a system of differentiating people, which only exists when it manages to build hierarchies in all of society and these hierarchies can interfere in all institutions.”

He goes one step further in his argument, “In order to reproduce itself, this structure acts in all institutions, in every existing space in society; it is something secular, something that replicates and changes form. The main characteristic of racism, for me, is its capacity for transformation, its ability to adapt to different social systems, and to maintain itself as a structuring force… So, if racism gives structure to all institutions, and if mobility is one of our society’s institutions, it stands to reason that racism will organize it, right?” questions Paique Santarém.

According to the researcher’s assessment, urban mobility cannot be seen as a consequence of socio-spatial segregation. On the contrary, it should be understood as an active, building agent of a policy that distances the black and low-income population from affluent areas. Far from the centers, this population is also, therefore, far from infrastructure and public services. This gap grows increasingly as cities—their services, opportunities, and infrastructure, including modes of transport—continue to develop unevenly, concentrating investments and opportunities in certain areas and making others precarious.

This mismatch that affects the existence and survival of black bodies so intensely comes from long ago. “The slave ship was the first space of racist mobility, which underwent an enormous push while cities were being born and structured and trams and trains were being set up… Until the 1930s, trams and trains were, simultaneously, mechanisms used to integrate cities and to segregate the black population, both because they could move this population further away and because of the rates imposed,” illustrates Santarém.

-continues in next post-

https://rioonwatch.org/?p=68040

It's wild that the first thing that occurs to a bunch of you is to say something negative. Wow. Get some mental health treatment, my guy.

Yeah, this is not helping Nigeria-Ghana relations. Legitimate businessmen must be going through it over there.

You already have a valuable trade. No matter where you go, you can earn. Considering your trade, if you went abroad on a uni visa, and did more barber training on the side (more versatility in styling for African clients, and training for other hair types) and got more experience in it, you could do well for yourself abroad. Going abroad to study business would be a good idea. If nothing else, you have good training to establish yourself back home.

Not bad. The sides could have a little better shape, and be faded out cleaner.

But why did the french fries launch in the air like that though? Aunty's jab is sKrong.

Seriously though, this is what she should have done: approach them with love.

She should have said something like, "Girls. You're better than that. You're smart, beautiful young ladies and that's not what you do."

I'm also offended because a perfectly good serving of chicken and chips was wasted for no reason.