Supreme Court Ready To Deliver Judgement May 6 Over River-Imo Legal Battle For 17 il wells

The Supreme Court, in Abuja, had fixed May 6 for judgment in a legal battle between Rivers and Imo States over the ownership of 17 oil wells in their territories.

The apex court fixed the date yesterday after taking arguments from lawyers involved in the tussle. Justice Olukayode Ariwoola, who led a panel of justices, fixed the date after adoption of final written addresses by the lawyers.

The plaintiff, represented by Joseph Daudu, while adopting his final addresses, asked the court to give judgment in favour of Rivers State on the ground that historical evidence, from 1927 till date, indicated the wells belong to the state.

In his own argument, counsel to Imo State, Chief Olusola Oke, asked the court to dismiss the suit on the grounds that it ought to have originated from the Federal High court.

Oke claimed that because of the nature of the matter, oral evidence ought to be called from people of the area to confirm where they actually belong.

MEANWHILE, operator of the Otakikpo Marginal Field in OML-11, Green Energy International Ltd (GEIL), has said it will commission the 12 Million Standard Cubic Feet per Day modular Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) extraction plant and 6MW power generating plants at the Otakikpo Marginal Field in Q2 2022.

These associated gas utilisation projects are a critical part of the operator’s flares-out project aimed at eliminating gas flaring and industrialising the host community by using the gas to generate energy for the community and the country.

This scale of modular LPG plant will be the first to be installed in the country, even as the company reiterated its intention to showcase success of the project to other industry players and the government as one of its contributions to eliminating associated gas flares in Nigerian oil fields.

According to Johnson Akinyemi, the project’s General Manager, “When completed, the project will supply daily about 60-metric-tonnes of LPG to the domestic market. The plant works on a Hybrid System and consists of four major processes of compression, dehydration, refrigeration, and hydrocarbon separation.”