Royal Dutch Shell's Bonga field, the biggest deep offshore field in Africa and holding more than 1 billion barrels of crude reserves, thus became a showpiece of success in the Gulf of Guinea. Other oil majors such as Chevron Corp, Exxon Mobil Corp and Total also followed with huge offshore oil discoveries that helped make the waters offshore Nigeria a leading global oil exploration hotspot.
However, the aura of invincibility that surrounded the deep-water oilfields in Nigeria is no more. It was shattered on 19 June when the main guerrilla group in the oil region, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), launched an overnight raid on the Bonga oilfield's floating, storage, production and offloading vessel, forcing it to shut down.