Oredola Adeola
The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC Ltd) has recommended increased cooperation among independent producers to tackle security, financial, technological, and other hurdles impeding the optimal growth of divested assets in the country’s oil and gas sector.
Mrs. Oritsemeyiwa Eyesan, NNPCL’s Executive Vice President, Upstream, suggested this on Wednesday at a panel session during the just concluded 2024 Nigerian International Energy Summit (NIES 2024) held in Abuja.
Eyesan, while speaking on the theme: “Innovation, Collaboration, and Resilience: Empowering Independent Producers in the Dynamic Energy Era”, stated that past experiences with divestments and how the assets were operated have left much to be desired as most of them experienced a drop in production rather than growth.
According to her, some of the challenges facing the independent producers include insecurity, lack of finance, and lack of technological capacity, stressing that with collaboration among industry players, the challenges could be surmounted.
She said, “In the industry, if you want to measure success, there are some basic indicators that you utilise – production growth, reserves growth, and asset integrity.
“If I were to evaluate prior investment initiatives and scale the actors using these indices, I will be untrue to myself if I say everybody has done well. Yes, we acquired the assets; but today, we are worse off in terms of production than we were when we did the acquisition”, the EVP lamented.
She, however, acknowledged that there were some success stories in the operations of the independent producers.
“Collaboration cannot be overemphasized. Somebody said we should be in a state of emergency, and I totally agree with that. It’s not by sitting here and talking about the challenges.
“I think we should have a war room where we raise the issues and set out concrete plans to resolve them rather than wait for stakeholders individually to take them on. We need collaboration, collaboration, and collaboration”, she enthused.
