Nigeria will soon resume drilling in the Lake Chad Basin after exploratory activities were halted on account of insurgency by Islamist extremist group, Boko haram.
Saidu Mohammed, NNPC’s chief executive officer in charge of Gas and Power, who represented the group MD Maikanti Baru, disclosed this on a visit to the Borno State governor, Kashim Shettima, in Maidugiri.
Mohammed said that light and heavy duty exploration equipment were being moved into the basin to commence full oil prospecting by the end of 2017.
“We are also in the state to inform you that in the next six weeks, we are going to redeploy our team of experts back to Maiduguri to resume oil exploration with better technology in the Lake Chad Basin.
“This is necessary with our renewed efforts in harnessing, Oil, Gas and Power to increase the economy of the nation, in line with the agenda of President Muhammadu Buhari in job creation and economic diversification.”
Successive NNPC management have been finding oil in the Lake Chad Basin a priority since discoveries were made in neighbouring countries in basins with similar structural settings years ago.
President Buhari last year instructed Baru to make oil find in the Lake Chad a priority. this is despite the fact that the search has been on for about years and gulped over $350 million without commensurate result.
In January this year, Mazadu Bako, NNPC Group General Manager, Frontier Exploration Services, at a conference in Lagos said Nigeria has acquired 3,550 sq. km of 3-D seismic data for processing and interpretation in addition to the already acquired 6000km of 2-D data that was being reprocessed then.
However while analysts say there may be a possibility of an oil find in the Lake Chad Basin, it may not be viable.
“While there is about 37 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and have about 187 trillion standard cubic feet of gas in the south, what we want to explore in the north is an unproven reserve of about 2.3 billion barrels of oil reserves and about 14.65 trillion standard cubic feet of natural gas available for four or more countries in the Chad Basin.
“If you do the cost benefit analysis, you can see that it is not viable in the short and medium term,” said Henry Boise, petroleum economist at the University of Port Harcourt.
Shetima commended the team for the visit and pledged his support because, “If the oil and gas, is found, it will not only generate revenue but create employment opportunities to the people across the country, particularly the North East region.”
The governor appealed to the NNPC to assist the state government in reconstructing and rebuilding schools, and other facilities and infrastructure destroyed by the violent insurgency.
