ABSTRACT
Chevron as the project’s manager and single largest shareholder. The project, which took off effectively in 1999, is expected to come into operation in December 2006, about one and half years behind the original construction deadline of June 2005. The fourth strategy is the conversion of associated gas into environmentally friendly liquid fuel (e.g. naphtha and diesel) for exports. Already, Chevron had reached an agreement in June 1999 with a South African oil and gas company Sasol to serve as technical partner in the construction and operation of a gas-toliquids (GTL) plant, which will be located adjacent to the onshore gas plant at Chevron’s EGP facility. The GTL plant is expected to come into operation before the government’s 2008 deadline for zero gas flare. It will have a projected capacity of 34,000 barrels GTL diesel, GTL naphtha and cooking gas per day. The Engineering Procurement and Construction (EPC) contract for the GTL project was awarded to a consortium of foreign companies, led by local subsidiaries of ChevronTexaco and Halliburton at the cost of $1.7 billion (Daily Champion, 2005). It is partly on the backdrop of these developments that an exploratory analysis of Chevron’ oil activities, as well as the correlated threat management systems and high stake rentier politics in the Niger Delta becomes mostly crucial. 6.2 A Background to the Oil Activities of ChevronTexaco in Nigeria ChevronTexaco, the third largest oil-producing company in Nigeria, is the product of the merger in October 2001 of two leading US oil transnationals, Chevron Corporation and Texaco Corporation. ChevronTexaco operates three subsidiary companies that have separate business histories in Nigeria, namely Chevron Nigeria Limited (CNL), Texaco Overseas Petroleum Company Unlimited (TOPCON) and StarDeep Water Petroleum. The three companies have a total production of about 520,000 barrels of oil per day and about 285 million cubic feet of gas per day. CNL and TOPCON operate under a joint venture arrangement with the NNPC (NNPC, 2002:33). Chevron Nigeria Limited (CNL) Chevron Nigeria Limited, popularly known as Chevron, is the largest of the ChevronTexaco subsidiaries in Nigeria. It commenced its Nigerian operation in December 1961 under the name Gulf Oil Company, a subsidiary of Gulf Corporation (Chevron’s original name) and only acquired its present name in July 1991 after the US parent company was renamed Chevron Corporation. The company’s oil mining concessions and production activities are widely distributed across offshore, near-shore, swamps and onshore areas, although more than half of the activities are concentrated in offshore and near-shore areas. Chevron is credited with the discovery of Nigeria’s first successful offshore field in December 1963, the Okan field located in the Western Niger Delta. Oil production and export took off in the offshore field in 1965. Chevron’s major storage and export terminal is located in Escravos, a near-shore tank farm off the coast of Warri in Delta State.
