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 Minister of State for Petroleum (Oil), Senator Heineken Lokpobiri, revealed this during a facility tour of Waltersmith Petroman Oil Limited’s modular refinery in Ibigwe, Ohaji-Egbema Local Government Area of Imo State, saying the bid exercise would commence “soon”.
This emerged just as the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) and the Oil Producers Trade Section (OPTS) yesterday met with oil firms and miners at the NEITI-Companies Forum, where they brainstormed on strengthening companies’ participation towards enhancing transparency and accountability in the nation’s oil and gas and solid minerals sectors.
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.
The minister was quoted in a statement issued yesterday, by the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB), disclosed that he had obtained presidential approval to conduct a fresh round of bidding, which would take place soon.
He promised that, “marginal fields would (henceforth) be prioritised 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.
According to the Minister, “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.”