The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation has said a team from the corporation is currently in London negotiating deals that will attract Foreign Direct Investments valued at about $7bn into Nigeria’s oil and gas sector.
The nation’s crude oil and condensate production had risen to 2.32 million barrels per day, the NNPC announced on Tuesday.
The corporation’s Group Managing Director, Dr Maikanti Baru, disclosed this at the Abuja headquarters of the oil firm while playing host to the executives of the Nigerian Union of Journalists, led by the President, Chris Isiguzo.
Baru said, “Since we came in, which was in July 2016, we have focused on increasing production of oil and gas and condensates. At some point, our national combined production was about a million barrels. I am happy that at the end of 2018, we had moved on, averaging about 2.1 million barrels.
“As I’m speaking, this morning, I looked at our production figures for oil and condensates combined, we are pushing 2.32 million barrels per day. I think this stability and ability to push production came as a consequence of several factors.”
He stated that in the gas sector, the corporation also pushed from a low level of about 450 million standard cubic feet per day, adding that for the domestic gas production alone, the figure hovered at about 1.5 billion standard cubic feet per day.
Baru said, “In our flagship subsidiary, the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company, we pushed production on equity side from a low figure of about 65,000bpd in 2016 to over 160,000bpd equity. And overall production for NPDC, we are able to maintain it at close to 300,000bpd. It is quite a significant boost.
“Also, the NPDC has become the main supplier of gas to the power sector, supplying over 800mscfd required to boost the production of power in this country. Currently, the power that we enjoy has about 80 per cent input from gas driven thermal power plants.”
On product supply, the NNPC boss said the Direct Sale of crude and Direct Purchase of petroleum products scheme saved Nigeria over $1.2bn in the first year of its operation, as against the previous Offshore Processing Arrangement.
Commenting on FDIs, he said the NNPC attracted $3.6bn and $3bn in 2017 and 2018 respectively, adding that negotiations were currently ongoing to attract several billions of dollar worth of investments into the sector.
“We’ve been able to attract FDIs into the oil and gas industry and in 2017 alone, we attracted about $3.6bn; in 2018, we attracted about $3bn. At the moment we are negotiating sums in the region of $7bn as FDIs that will come into the oil and gas sector,” Baru said.