DPR issues pre-qualification notice to successful bidders for Nigeria’s marginal fields

The Department of Petroleum Resources has issued notices to companies that were successful in their application to be prequalified for the ongoing bid rounds on 57marginal fields in Nigeria.

“Your pre-qualification application is successful,” the DPR wrote in a note to one of the successful companies. “A formal letter will be forwarded to you in due course,” the agency said on Friday.

The DPR has not disclosed this publicly yet including the details of all the companies that qualified. This could not be ascertained at the time of filing the report.

Two weeks ago, Auwalu Sarki, Director of the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) said over 600 companies have applied to be prequalified for the bid rounds, the first in almost 20 years. It is not expected that they would all be successful.

Sarki said Nigeria’s last bid round for the marginal fields was in 2003, and also revealed that the bidding exercise has garnered a lot of interest due to the transparent process set up by the DPR.

However the agency have had to push the deadline for submission which he said accounted for about 30 percent more participation.

“If you are making a bid or auctioning any oil field, you need to get 10 people per field really going after the field. We have 57 fields and we have over 600 companies. So we can say that we are celebrating success so far,” he told the News Agency of Nigeria, two weeks ago.

“After the extension, we are moving according to schedule and now we are in the phase where we do pre-qualification for the bidders to apply,” he said.

Nigeria’s previous marginal fields bid rounds have not been short of enthusiasm the trouble has always been getting local oil companies that win the bids to develop the fields.

Many have been constrained by the volatile nature of oil prices which rubbishes the assumptions that fed their bids, others have had challenges raising financing. Some have also been ill-prepared and faced with uncertain government policy, they fail to develop the fields.