The Federal Government on Monday said moves to produce four million barrels of crude oil per day and grow the country’s reserves to 40 billion barrels will be achieved through marginal oilfields.
It stated that last week’s marginal oilfield licensing round would push Nigeria to realise this ambitious crude oil production target.
The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Chief Timipre Sylva, who disclosed this at the 2021 Nigeria International Petroleum Summit in Abuja, also called for collaboration among operators to achieve this feat.
This came as the Managing Director, Huawei Nigeria EBU, Michael Zhuang, stated that operators in the sector would have to partner and deploy technology to effectively grow the country’s oil production.
Speaking on moves to grow oil production, Sylva said, “This year’s NIPS comes on the eve of the award of new marginal field licences after several failed attempts over the past 20 years.
“Getting these new set of marginal fields off the ground is definitely a stepping stone towards achieving the country’s aspiration of meeting the target of 4mbpd oil production and 40 billion of proven reserves.”
On the need to collaborate, the minister said, “For me, the new approach is collaboration. That is the paradigm shift I want to focus on at this summit.
“I know that collaboration has been a buzz word in the oil and gas industry for years. But the industry has equally paid lip service to it.”
Also speaking on collaborations, Zhuang stated that Huawei had to develop an ecosystem for partnership through which it collaborated with local and international organisations.
On how the firm would drive production of more barrels of crude, he explained that for the upstream exploration and production arm, the company would speed up oil search and improve oil search accuracy.
For crude oil production data, Zhuang said the target was to increase production and reduce cost.
On pipeline data, he stated that there would be adequate monitoring of oil depot data to reduce oil theft and leakage.
