Indigenous oil firms, A.A. Rano, Shafa Exploration, Emadeb Energy, Matrix Energy, and Vhelblerg Exploration have been awarded licence to prospect marginal oil fields by the Department of Petroleum Resources, DPR.
Other companies that were licenced and announced on Monday were Sigmund Oil Field, Casiva Ltd, Duchess Energy and Duport Midstream.
Just a few of the companies that won the 57 oil fields were announced on the occasion.
The award crystallised a year after 2020 marginal field bid round began with 591 companies applying to win 57 oil fields on offer.
The oil fields are located onshore, swamps and offshore.
DPR estimates that Nigeria would produce additional 100 million barrels of crude oil from the 57 fields, in the coming years.
DPR Director/CEO, Engr Auwalu Sarki said the fields would boost Nigeria’s daily oil production capacity beyond the current three million barrels per day.
He stated that after undergoing lengthy and vigorous process, 161 companies were shortlisted as potential awardees out of which 50 percent have met all conditions.
He assured the licenced companies that the DPR would not abandon them after the award.
Sarki declared that the DPR would work with them to ensure immediate development and attainment of first oil in a record time.
According to him: “The journey began exactly one year ago on June 1, 2020 with the launching of the Bid round registration portal.
“The portal eased the registration and application process and ensured a transparent exercise.
“It also provided the platform for the virtual data room. It is important to state that the industry-enabled National Data Repository (NDR) provided all the requisite technical and logistics support for the successful conduct of the exercise.”
He said DPR would ensure that the indigenous companies faced minimal challenges from the International Oil Companies, the original lease owners for the fields.
He explained that the challenges that hindered the attainment of full development of the last marginal fields awarded 17 years had been considered and tackled.
He explained that out of the 24 fields awarded in 2003, 11 fields remained undeveloped, locking in over 40 million barrels of oil.
Read him: “With the lessons of the previous exercise, we want to refocus, change the approach; we have developed strategy to ensure you (the companies) and the awarded fields achieve early development.
“The DPR will continue and guide all of you every step of the way. For instance, the guiding template for working agreement has been drafted for joint awardees and discussions have reached advance stage between DPR and lease holders on the farm out agreement.”
Sarki expressed optimism that the development of the oil fields would stimulate job creation because “all the awardees have to recruit people which mean more taxes and revenue to government and at the same time it enhances the GDP because the contribution of the industry to the GDP is very low.”
“What DPR did was evaluate various recovery factors. We saw the average recovery value that we do have now, ranges from 27-38.
“If we increased this by five percent only across, we will hit the 40 billion barrels and at the same time we will hit above three million barrels.
“We have identified 7,000 reservoirs and we are producing from about 1,700 reservoirs. We took each of the producing reservoirs to see what kind of enhanced oil recovery that we need to put and once we put the secondary and tertiary recovery methods, technically we grow the reserves and production for the country,” Sarki stated while ecplaining how the awards would improve Nigeria’s oil production.
Speaking on behalf of the bid winners, the Chairman of Vhelblerg, Bank Anthony Okoroafor thanked DPR for holding a transparent bid exercise.
According to him: “It was open to everybody; there was communication established with everybody and they did their own work very well.”
He, nevertheless, urged DPR to support the winning firms by talking to IOCs to allow the operators use their facilities if it was the most effective options.
