$500m Marginal Fields: We have not merged companies together — DPR
The Department of Petroleum Resources ( DPR) has denied merger of bidders for the 57 marginal fields placed on offer during the Marginal fields bid round launched in June 2020. This is contrary to letters of awards being circulated by email directing winners to pay certain percentage of signature bonus field allocated into the Treasury Single Account ( TSA) of the Federal Government.
According to the 2020 guideline, a marginal field is any field that has oil and gas reserves booked and reported annually to the Department of Petroleum Resources ( DPR) and has remained in-produced for a period of over 10 years.The Head Public Affairs Unit, DPR in reaction to the enquiry by Nigerian NewsDirect disclosed that the marginal field bid round is still ongoing and no company has been awarded any asset. According to him, shortlisted companies have only been notified to make payments for signature bonus as indicated in the guidelines.
“This indicates that we have not merged any company together,” he asserted.
Mr Osu added that “Section 9 of our marginal fields guidelines effective Jun 2020 states that signature bonus shall be paid as specified in the ‘Notice of Preferred Bidders status’.”
This, he noted has been clearly adhered to without ambiguity.
When a softcopy of Marginal Fields Guidelines was forwarded to Mr Osu as the point of reference, he claimed that the copy is obviously not the guidelines issued by the DPR.
“This guideline you brought is fake in its entirety. Please visit our website www.dpr.gov.ng and see our guidelines for marginal fields under ‘Upstream’ button,” he suggested.
Bidders for the 2020 marginal fields had expressed fear over the matching with strange companies as partners in various leasehold.
However, Osu refused to react to the allegation of the process being hijacked by money bags sponsoring more than two to three companies.
Participants had alleged hijack by money bags determined to acquire some of the marginal fields offered by the DPR.
They alleged that money bags acting as promoters of Indigenous companies as sponsors are allegedly sponsoring more than two companies as bidders for different fields since the Federal Government had approved $500 million as the revenue target from the marginal fields bid round.
During a television programme recently, Director DPR Engineer Sarki Auwalu confirmed that the bid round processes for the 57 marginal fields which started in June 2020 would be concluded before the need of first quarter 2021.
Beside the objective of using the marginal fields bid round to grow Nigeria’s capacity of oil and gas production by expanding the scope of participation through diversification of resources and inflow of investments, a major objective of the exercise is to grow the capacity of high technology driven indigenous professionals in the upstream sector of the Nigerian Oil and gas industry so as to provide jobs for pool of unemployed.
Contrary to the alleged hijack by money bags, one of the objectives of the Marginal fields 2020 bid round as contained in the marginal field guideline 2020 Section 4(v) is to gainfully engage the pool of high-level technically competent Nigerians in the oil & gas, Also Section 10.0 (PAYMENT OF SIGNATURE BONUSES & OTHER FEES) denied by the DPR Public Affairs states that (1) On the grant of a Marginal Field, the signature bonus shall be paid within the period of 90 days from the date of award.
