The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has urged members of the Independent Petroleum Producers Group (IPPG), a business group in Nigeria, to participate in the forthcoming bid round for 30 marginal oil fields.
Maikanti Baru, the group managing director (GMD) of NNPC, stated this Friday in Abuja when he received a delegation from IPPG, led by its chairman, Ademola Adeyemi-Bero.
Baru urged them to take advantage of the marginal oil fields bid offer, while also leveraging on the low crude oil price regime in the country to develop their capacity and acquire technology.
In a statement issued Friday by Ndu Ughamadu, NNPC’s group general manager, group corporate affairs division, the corporation said the bid offer will soon be flagged off by the federal government.
Marginal fields are crude oil reserves which have been discovered but remain exploited for long due to factors such as very small reserve sizes, lack of infrastructure in their vicinity and unavailability profitable consumers.
The NNPC boss said there were lots of opportunities in the marginal fields that would soon be available, while urging the IPPG to work hand-in-hand with the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) to ensure that they met the conditions that would be required from bidders.
“The marginal oil field lease renewal is an opportunity for your group, and you will need to engage the DPR early in discussion to find out the conditions that the Federal Government is interested in. For example, the supply of gas to power and fertilizer plants, and I think your group will be successful,” Baru stated.
The GMD also tasked the IPPG members to ramp up their collective production from 10 per cent of national production to fifty per cent in the next 10 years in order to increase the footprint of indigenous companies in the upstream sub-sector as is the case in the downstream.
He said the Corporation was very proud of them and was looking forward to a time when about ninety per cent of upstream operations in the country would be controlled by them, in line with the government’s local content policy.
Baru applauded members of the group for their productive community engagement which had stemmed the incidence of pipeline sabotage along the Trans Forcados Pipeline and enjoined them to extend similar gesture to the communities around the other crude oil lines to help stabilize national production.
Responding, Adeyemi-Bero, who made a presentation to the NNPC management, said the group was made up of twenty five active indigenous producers and driven by the passion to support the 12 business focus areas of the current management of NNPC and the seven big wins initiative of the federal government.
The IPPG chairman praised the federal government for initiating the joint venture cash call exit programme, stressing that the move would bolster their activities in the upstream sub-sector.
IPPG was formed in 2016, with the mandate to promote and advance the collective interest of members in a coordinated manner, while serving as a unified advocacy platform for federal government policies in the upstream sub-sector of the Nigerian oil and gas industry.
