NNPC office | File Image
By Stella Odueme
The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC) has called for deeper collaboration among upstream operators, especially independent producers, to bring sanity in the nation’s oil and gas industry.
A statement by Olufemi O. Soneye, the chief Corporate Communications Officer of NNPC, at the weekend said that the company’s Executive Vice President, Upstream, Mrs. Oritsemeyiwa Eyesan, made the call at a panel session in the ongoing 2024 Nigerian International Energy Summit (NIES 2024) holding in Abuja.
On the theme: “Innovation, Collaboration, and Resilience: Empowering Independent Producers in the Dynamic Energy Era”, Eyesan said that past experiences with divestments and how the assets were operated left much to be desired as most of them experienced a drop in production rather than growth.
“In the industry, if you want to measure success, there are some basic indicators that you utilise – production growth, reserves growth, and asset integrity.
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“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”, she lamented.
She, however, acknowledged that there were some success stories in the operations of the independent producers.
She identified some of the challenges to include insecurity, lack of finance, and lack of technological capacity, stressing that with collaboration among industry players, the challenges could be surmounted.
“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 stated.
The panel session had key players in the sector such as: the Chief Executive Officer of Aradel Holdings, Mr. Adegbite Falade; Managing Director of SNEPCo, Mrs Elohor Aiboni; Managing Director of First E & P Development Company, Mr. Demola Adeyemi-Bero; and Chief Executive Officer, TotalEnergies, Mr. Matthieu Bouyer.
Others were: the Chief Executive Officer, ExxonMobil Nigeria, Mr. Shane Harris; Chief Operating Officer, Oando Energy Resources, Dr Ainojie Alex Irune; and Director, Joint Venture, Chevron Nigeria, Mr. Cosmas Iwueze.
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