Nigeria Needs $6 Billion to Grow Oil, Gas Sector

Nigeria may require over $6 billion investment to grow activities in the oil and gas sector.

This was the submission of discussants at the ongoing World Petroleum Congress (WPC), which opened in Moscow, the Russian capital yesterday.

The participants urged the Federal Government to sustain the ongoing transformation in the sector assuring that the funds needed to be invested in the sector was available.

However, they argued that the controversies surrounding the passage of Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) have been discouraging such investment.

Group Executive Director (GED), Commercial and Investment, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Attahir Yusuf, said there has always been money to fund the oil and gas industry, “but such funding could take the form of equity financing, bonds and project financing.”

On equity financing, he argued that the country could finance its projects through such arrangement because it does not have enough money, and also cannot afford to waste its scarce resources.

“We can go for projects financing. There are criteria for that and there are peculiar projects for that too,” he said. According to the GED, there are so many ways Nigeria can raise money but what the country needs is to carefully look at what it wants, what funding will be suitable for what to do and engage different funding organisations that are ready to partner in the project.

“The conclusion therefore for us as a country is that we have a lot of funding requirements and we all know that we don’t have all the funding so, we have to look for fund. But the good thing is that the funds are available, so we have to look at our requirements; what is it for, be it exploration, production or inter-infrastructural developments and then call on those that can assist us,” he said.

Another participant, Frankly Brooks, also stated that: “We discovered that there are lots of funds that are available, which can be invested in the oil and gas sector. Our estimation is that in the next 20 years, the industry would require trillions of dollars globally.”

[Daily Sun]

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Attahir Yusuf, Nigeria, Oil and Gas sector