The Chairman/Managing Director of Chevron Nigeria Ltd, Andrew Fawthrop, has advocated timely implementation of the right policies and improved infrastructure, a panacea for transforming Nigeria into a gas power house. He said the country should be bothered about the huge dependence on oil to the detriment of gas which according to him stands at about 184 trillion cubic feet (tcf).
Fawthrop’s submission was part of the positions unanimously adopted by international players in Nigeria’s oil and gas industry in a panel discussion on the current operational environment and outlook for the oil industry in Nigeria, at the on-going Nigeria Oil and Gas Conference yesterday in Abuja.
Also in his reflections on the industry, over the years, the Group Executive Director, Exploration and Production, NNPC, Mr Abiye Membere, said, “The oil and industry didn’t start well. Basically what we are doing in the last decades is to try to correct it. We started the oil and gas industry in Nigeria only looking for oil, gas was as if it was a poisonous product. What happened over the last 50 years is that there is a major oil infrastructure in place and the gas infrastructure is lagging behind.”
Country Chair, Shell Companies in Nigeria and managing director Shell Petroleum Development Company, Mr. Kroll, said Nigeria’s oil and gas is a mixture of challenges and real threats ” bureaucracy is a major hassle, it is overwhelming ” he said, calling for an adoption of a practical approach as means of overcoming these threats. These practical approaches, he added, involve oil companies, taking up projects they are able to fund, possess trusted partnership among industry operators and regulators and have the needed capacity building of indigenous workforce, among others.
Senior Vice President and MD, Addax Petroleum, Cornelius Zegelar, and chairman ExxonMobil Companies Nigeria, Mr Mark Ward, in their contribution, insisted that no amount of security will curb local community induced problems because they are social problems that government must solve with the oil communities being adequately carried along.
Zegelar said: ‘’Until we have the needed infrastructure, security, capacity building of indigenous workforce, funding, discovery of new resources, policy implementation and partnership among oil companies and Nigerian regulators are strengthened, Nigeria will not attain its potentials’’.
