Oil companies stop fields for 180 days annually

Chineme Okafor
Former Director of the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) and Senior Consultant to the National Assembly on the Bill on the Petroleum Industry (GDP), Mr. Osten Olorunsola revealed that oil and gas companies operating in The country has stopped producing fields up to 180 days a year following operational challenges in the Niger Delta.

Speaking yesterday at a roundtable on GDP organized by the Natural Resources Charter of Nigeria and the Media Initiative on Transparency in Extractive Industries (MITEI) in Abuja, Olorunsola, explained that the situation in Nigeria was different from what had been obtained in other oil destinations around the world.

million. Olorunsola, a member of the CNDR's Advisory Panel of Experts (NAC), said at a meeting that most oil-producing countries only record 30 and 45 days off production and produce

This, he explained, was not the case in Nigeria, where he noted that frequent pipeline breaks and uncertainties about badet safety were responsible for the long delays in Operational stoppage currently registered by the country. to be in business and you can not do anything for two years, and you have staff and you just pay them salaries for two years, you have to be a generous non-governmental organization (NGO). "There are operations around the world where the days of production, you can almost guarantee 330 days, you can not do it," he says. do it all year, because you have a scheduled interview and all that, but usually no more than 30 and 45 days, nothing more is not good.
He indicated that the Trans Forcados pipeline was down. He also said that nothing in 2018, some distribution chains were closed for 84 days, thereby impeding oil production.

He also talked about the level of work done. so far on the various bills created from the GDP, which include the PIGB, Petroleum Industry Community Host Bill (PIHCB), Petroleum Industry Fiscal Bill (PIFB) and Petroleum Industry Administration Bill (PIAB).
On the IGBP, he explained that the bill that is now reportedly with President Muhammadu Buhari, has a philosophy that insists that upstream petroleum license holders would either drill their oil blocks immediately or the abandon
Olorunsola also stated that the 1993 royalty concession granted to operators in the country's deep-water operations should not have been structured in the way it was structured.

According to him, this should have been a suspended royalty structure. In addition, he noted that the National Assembly has created a fifth bill of GDP, to address the issues of oil revenue management, but that the bill has been largely upheld by the provisions of Nigeria's constitution on revenue management.
"A lot of things around the sharing of money in our country are guided by the constitution.You can not write a bill that will void the constitution and that's the problem.There are some things we wanted to include in this bill, but it was said that we should fix that in the constitution and then come back.
"The countries of the world have laws on revenue management, do it because that it is the right thing to do, "he added