Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu has approved the conduct of fresh marginal field bid round to offer for sale more oil and gas fields abandoned by the international oil companies (IOCs) which have been lying fallow for over a decade.
The new bid round is coming barely three years after about 57 marginal oilfields were put up for sale in 2020 and the process effectively concluded last year, amid many of the awardees still struggling to move to site for development of their assets due largely to funding and regulatory challenges.
Minister of State for Petroleum (Oil), Senator Heineken Lokpobiri, who revealed this during a facility tour of Waltersmith Petroman Oil Limited’s modular refinery in Ibigwe, Ohaji-Egbema Local Government Area of Imo State, said the bid exercise would commence “soon”.
He promised that, “marginal fields would (henceforth) be prioritized in terms of their location to those who have modular refineries, so that they will be able to produce.”
The marginal field exercise is exclusively reserved for Nigerian companies as the federal government through the policy offers opportunity to local firms to participate more actively in the country’s oil and gas exploration and production space.
It is essentially to help increase Nigeria’s oil and gas production and reserves, boost federation’s revenue, create jobs for the teeming population and contribute to the development of the host communities.
Lokpobiri, however, commended Waltersmith Group and the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB) for supporting the federal government agenda of improving domestic refining capacity.
The Minister expressed satisfaction towards the company and NCDMB for taking the bull by the horn to commence local refining of crude and partially meeting the demand of the local.
According to him, “The quickest way to fix our energy challenge in the country should be through modular refineries, while we await the total rehabilitation of the big refineries.”
He said the 5,000-barrel per stream day Waltersmith Petroman, which has been a stable source of diesel, kerosene, naphta, and high fuel oil to the domestic market since its inauguration in 2020, was for him a proof of how beneficial such smaller processing plants could be.
Lokpobiri, expressed commendation to the NCDMB Board for taking up equity in Waltersmith Refinery which quickly facilitated the completion of the modular refinery.
While commending Waltersmith Group, the minister charged companies who had been given licences for modular refineries and marginal field licences to take cues from Waltersmith and make deliberate investments.
He stated, “If you have a marginal field, an allocation, it is a paper given to you, it doesn’t add value to you or to Nigeria, unless you take it to the next level by making the requisite investment and then adding the value that is expected.”
“What I am saying is that out of the numerous marginal fields that were allocated, only Waltersmith and a few of them have been successfully driven,” he stated, recalling that he had sounded a warning at the recent Nigeria Economic Summit Group (NESG) event in Abuja, that marginal field allocations without the requisite investments stood the risk of being cancelled.
Source: https://thelegiit.com
