The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Sylva, has said that a bilateral agreement between Nigeria and Spain would attract Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) into the oil and gas sector.
Sylva, who said this when he hosted a delegation of Spanish investors led by the country’s foreign affairs minister, Jose Manuel Alvares, added that the renewed partnership would not only deepen exploration of Nigeria’s abundant gas reserves but it would also increase the product to its European market.
Presently, Nigeria’s proven gas reserves stands at 200 trillion cubic feet of gas with the potential to rise to 600 TCF.
The minister described Spain as a strategic partner with Nigeria in the area of oil and gas trade, and stressed that their discussion centred on the development of gas, security in the petroleum industry and technology among other issues.
“A partner and customer of NLNG from inception, so, you can see that this meeting is actually a meeting between partners. And of course, as you see, the minister came to Nigeria so early in the year, I’m very certain that it’s the first foreign minister that is visiting Nigeria this year.
“We need all the investments we require as the oil and gas sector is at the core of our economy. And if he comes in with all this array of investors and if the minister comes with this array of potential investors, then I’m sure that we have the potential of having a lot of investments coming into Nigeria.
“So it will be a win-win for both countries because Europe also requires the gas today we’ve always been shouting that the energy transition program should be more mindful of the development of gas as well, because there was the clamour from some sources to move so quickly to renewables and we thought as a country we felt that we were going to move on the transition train through the instrumentality of gas,” he said.
In his remarks, the Spanish foreign affairs minister expressed hope that the meeting will crystallise to the development of energy for both countries.
“I want to thank the Minister for telling me about evolution and the opportunities in the Nigerian Petroleum industry. And I hope that the meetings that both sides of the private sector ‘both Spanish and Nigeria’ had would be able to deploy their full potential. Nigeria is a strategic partner with Spain, it has been all these years and it has proven that it is our friend and a trustworthy partner in the very complex set in the energy market around the world. And we have to work on the concrete aspect to develop this bilateral relationship on energy,” he said.
