Yemisi Izuora
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, is facilitating the growth of the midstream oil sector with a view to opening up other ancillary sectors that will help boost the industrial sector.
Already, the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company, NPDC, is beginning to grow its natural gas production by 150 million cubic square feet per day in line with government aspiration, according to Dr. Maikanti Baru, the managing director of the NNPC.
Baru in his key note address at the Oil and Gas Conference in Abuja, said, “Beyond growing gas for the power sector, there has been a strategic positioning of the sector to support massive gas-based industrialization,”.
“We will incubate and midwife a portfolio of critical and mutually dependent investments – Central Processing Facilities, CPFs, Fertilizer, Petrochemical, Free Trade Zone, FTZ, infrastructure and Ports – which will jumpstart the gas revolution agenda.
NNPC intends to develop or take equity in some of these gas-based industries such as fertilizer and others.”
Equally, the NPDC is strategically repositioning itself to see its production grow to 500,000 barrels per day by 2020, Baru revealed.
He expressed confidence that the country’s oil and gas sector had started down the road to recovery as barrel prices trend closer to $60.
Pipeline vandalism in the Niger Delta by militant groups – a major cause of the drop in exports that Nigeria saw last year is now becoming less frequent, he observed.
“We are having a lot of engagements with people in our core area of operations in the Niger Delta and this is bringing a lot of hope,” Baru said.
“If we go by the number of pipeline vandalism cases, they have dropped to an average of 20 per cent on a monthly basis as against a similar period last year. This is an indicator that calm is returning to the environment,” he added.