BY Wasilat Azeez
The Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) says that out of 7,000 oil reserves that have been discovered in the country, only 1,700 of the reserves are currently producing crude oil.
Sarki Auwalu, DPR director, made this known on Monday at the award ceremony for successful investors in the 2020 marginal field bid round programme.
Matrix Energy Limited, Shafa Exploration and Production Company Limited and A.A Rano Nigeria Limited are some of the firms that emerged winners of the bid rounds for 57 marginal fields which began on June 1, 2020.
Nigeria last conducted marginal field bid rounds in 2003.
Auwalu explained that measures were being put in place to produce oil from additional reserves in order to achieve the 40 billion barrels oil reserves target of government.
“We identified all the discovered reserves. We have about 7,000 and we are producing from about 1,700 out of the 7,000 already discovered reservoirs,” he said.
“We took each of the producing reservoirs to see what kind of enhance oil recovery (EOR) that we need to put. So, once we now put the EOR, that is secondary and tertiary recovery methods, technically we will grow the reserves.
“This is because those reserves are recoverable now and technically we will increase the production of the country.”
According to the DPR, Nigeria had the capacity to produce about three million barrels of crude daily.
Crude oil production in Nigeria is estimated at 1.4 million barrels per day (bpd) following the production cut recommended by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
Before the decision by OPEC and its allies to cut down crude production, Nigeria’s daily crude oil production was around two million barrels.
The DPR director expressed optimism that marginal oil fields would increase and grow the country’s reserves.
“Remember we left over 40 million barrels fallow in 11 fields for 17 years. Now we have over 100 million which we want to grow within the next couple of months,” he said.
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