Petrobras to invest $2 billion in Nigeria oil

By Randy Fabi

ABUJA (Reuters) - Brazil's state-run oil firm Petrobras expects to invest $2 billion in oil exploration and production in Nigeria over the next five years, a senior executive said on Tuesday.

"Nigeria is one of the most important areas outside of Brazil to Petrobras' investment plan," Rudy Ferreira, managing director of the Petrobras subsidiary in Nigeria, told Reuters on the sidelines of an oil and gas conference in Abuja.

Ferreira said he was hopeful Nigeria's newest deep offshore oilfield Akpo, which is 20 percent owned by Petrobras, would come onstream before its April 1 target date and be producing around 185,000 barrels per day by September or October.

He said Africa's biggest oil producer was second only to the Gulf of Mexico for the company's foreign investment plans of $15.7 billion over the next five years.

Petrobras, which first invested in Nigeria about a decade ago, has already spent around $2.5 billion in the world's eighth largest oil exporter.

With the introduction of Akpo, Petrobras' share of Nigeria's oil production was expected to average 70,000 bpd by the end of the year, he said.

Petrobras recently received approval from Nigeria's state-run oil firm NNPC to help develop the Egina offshore oilfield, which will be operated by French major Total.

The next stage was to find contractors to help develop the field, which lies around 20 km from Akpo, Ferreira said.

"After all the engineering is in place, we hope to advance to the next stage of contracting out the Egina facilities in 2010," he said.