The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) has called for deeper collaboration among upstream operators, especially independent producers, to find solutions to the challenges hindering the development of divested assets in the nation’s oil and gas industry.

The NNPCL Executive Vice President, Upstream, Oritsemeyiwa Eyesan, made the call at a panel session in the ongoing 2024 Nigerian International Energy Summit (NIES 2024) in Abuja on Wednesday, February 28, 2024.

Eyesan 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.

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.”

NNPCL, OPEC pledge collaboration for investments, increased production

The NNPCL Vice President, 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,” Eyesan added.

The panel session had key players in the sector, including the Chief Executive Officer of Aradel Holdings, Adegbite Falade; the Managing Director of SNEPCo, Elohor Aiboni; the Managing Director of First E&P Development Company, Demola Adeyemi-Bero; and Chief Executive Officer of TotalEnergies, Matthieu Bouyer; among others.

The Star