The company said it also awarded a contract for a 56 km transmission line that will convey electricity from the plant to be built at its Qua Iboe oil export terminal in the southern state of Akwa Ibom to the national power grid.
It did not say who the contracts had been awarded to.
When completed the plant should help ease the country's power crisis, considered one of the main brakes on economic growth for Africa's top oil and gas producer.
"The project ... demonstrates our support of increasing power generation in Nigeria in line with the federal government's desire to boost electricity supply," the company's Managing Director Mark Ward said in a statement.
The front-end engineering and design contract for the project, which is a joint venture with state-run oil firm NNPC, is expected to be completed in 12 months, ExxonMobil said, without stating the cost.
Nigeria has been keen to raise domestic power generation through independent power projects, but the lack of a strong regulatory framework has attracted little new private sector investment.
But the world's eighth-biggest oil exporter has recently made increasingly strident public demands for Western oil firms to help raise domestic gas use, saying the time has come for companies that have seen decades of profit to help resolve its chronic power crisis.
Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation of about 140 million people, has the capacity to generate around 3,000 MW, but generation often plunges to less than 1,000 MW, largely due to a lack of maintenance at power stations. South Africa, with a third of Nigeria's population, has over 10 times the capacity.
reuters.com
Posted: at | |