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Nigerian billionaire Muhammadu Indimi is doubling down on the country’s oil future with a $315 million offshore vessel that underscores how local producers are slowly muscling into a space once dominated by the majors.
Indimi’s company, Oriental Energy Resources Ltd, has celebrated the sailaway of the EMEM floating production, storage and offloading vessel—an FPSO that will serve as the production hub for the Okwok field offshore Nigeria. The unit was converted at Dubai’s Drydocks World shipyard and is due to head to Nigerian waters in late 2025, according to company and government statements.
The EMEM, named in honour of the late matriarch of the Indimi family, is being billed as the first fully funded and converted FPSO by a Nigerian indigenous company, a milestone that has drawn a parade of officials to Dubai. Nigeria’s minister of state for petroleum resources, Heineken Lokpobiri, three state governors and senior regulators joined Indimi for the ceremony.
The vessel can process up to 40,000 barrels of oil per day and store about 1 million barrels, and will initially handle production from five wells at Okwok, tying into a wellhead platform already installed on the field. It is designed to complement Oriental’s existing output from the nearby Ebok field, giving the privately held explorer a more robust production base.
For Nigeria, the timing is deliberate. Regulators have linked the project to the government’s “Project One Million Barrels” initiative, which aims to restore and push crude output higher after years of under-investment, theft and pipeline outages. During a recent four-hour inspection of the vessel in Dubai, the head of the upstream regulator, Gbenga Komolafe, said EMEM would help the country meet its production goals and promised continued support for Oriental’s expansion.
For Indimi, whose wealth was built in the often opaque world of Nigerian oil licences and contracts, the project is also a statement of intent. Oriental, founded in 1990, holds interests in Ebok, Okwok and OML 115 and has long talked about reaching 100,000 barrels a day in output. Company statements suggest Okwok alone could eventually contribute around 30,000 barrels a day, putting that target closer.
“It’s not just another project milestone,” one Oriental engineer said at the event, describing the FPSO as proof that local players can deliver complex offshore developments without ceding control to international oil companies.
Officials have been just as keen to frame the vessel as a symbol of policy success. Lokpobiri called EMEM “a statement of confidence in Nigeria’s petroleum industry,” arguing that investments like this are needed to fund the country’s broader development plans.
Once in place on Okwok, EMEM is expected to operate for at least 15 years. If production ramps as planned and oil prices hold, the $315 million bet could pay off handsomely for Indimi—turning a once-quiet marginal field into a source of millions of barrels, and millions of dollars, for one of Nigeria’s richest men.
