OREANDA-NEWS. November 19, 2012. The Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, Engineer Andrew Yakubu, has urged members of the National Association of Petroleum Explorationist, NAPE, to collaborate with the Corporation in enhancing domestic gas utilization in tandem with the gas revolution programme of the Federal Government.

In a remark at the 30th Annual International Conference & Exhibitions of NAPE held in Lagos, on Monday, the GMD implored members of NAPE to use the conference to address the new ways of replacing the depleting petroleum resources, the high cost of doing business in the industry, and the impact of the Petroleum Industry Bill, PIB, in the Nigerian petroleum sector.

“Despite challenges being faced by the industry in recent times, it has remained vibrant with significant increase in exploration activities in the past years. There are more than seven exploration rigs that are actively engaged in different locations in the acreages. The preliminary reports from most of the exploration activities have indicated positive potentials with great promises of enhancing the reserve potentials of the country,” Engr. Yakubu said.

The GMD assured members of NAPE that NNPC, as the industry leader, will sustain the recent initiatives in the oil industry to ensure that the country maintains the tempo in the drive not only to replenish our produced oil and gas but also to achieve the aspirations and targets of 40 billion barrels of oil reserve in the nearest future.

According to Engr. Yakubu, to achieve the nation’s aspiration in the sector, NNPC has re-positioned its subsidiaries, particularly the IDSL to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the National hydrocarbon reserve growth targets. The data acquisition, storage and processing capacities of IDSL have been greatly enhanced to achieve these objectives. Building on the success of the 100 percent Nigeria seismic-crew, the process of building IDSL capacity has started to venture into marine data acquisition.

He informed that in furtherance of the desire to increase Nigeria’s oil reserve base, more efforts and resources will be geared towards exploration activities, particularly on New Frontiers and the deep and ultra-deep offshore basins adding that currently, the NNPC through its frontier exploration services, NFES, is engaged in exploration programmes in seven inland basins of Anambra, Bida, Sokoto, Chad, Benue trough, Dahomey, Gongola/Yola in Nigeria.

The NNPC helmsman stated that the geological reports from some of the basins indicate that more potentials may lay abound in the basins stressing that though security challenges have slowed down progress of work in some of these areas, NNPC will continue to forge ahead in the quest to deliver value to stakeholders in the industry.

He called on all stakeholders in the Oil and Gas industry to pursue aggressive deep-water exploration in offshore Lagos, taking on board lessons learnt from the jubilee field discovery in Ghana – Dahomey Basin, encourage utilization of novel technology for other inland basins to increase the nations hydrocarbons potentials, intensify planned exploration and exploitation of the vast gas resources in support of domestic and export gas market, explore and adopt new technology which is aimed at increasing the hydrocarbon reserves base to meet our aspiration and continually address security issues as they affect our operations.

In her remark, the Honourable Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Allison-Madueke, applauded NAPE for supporting the Federal Government’s Transformation Agenda and  urged the stakeholders in the industry to come up with integrated solutions to address some of the teething problems of the industry.