The site is located 150 kilometers from the coast, or one hour by helicopter. The immense platform measures more than 300 meters long, the equivalent of an Eiffel Tower floating on the water. When it finishes its journey, the gas arrives at an immense industrial site on land, as large as 300 football pitches. An LNG tanker then transports a cargo of TotalEnergies gas.
The gas is extracted with very long pipes that connect the platform to the seabed. About forty wells in total are spread across a gigantic gas field, as large as a third of the city of Paris.
Exceptionally, journalists were able to visit one of the largest gas extraction platforms in the world, operated by TotalEnergies, off the coast of southern Nigeria.
A Frenchman has been its chief for two years. He runs this steel monster, the Egina platform, of which he knows every last corner.
The platform sells more than one and a half million euros of gas every day. TotalEnergies has just invested 700 million euros there to exploit a new deposit. The cargo ship must position itself to within 10 centimeters, because to unload its millions of liters of gas, the pipes must be perfectly aligned.