‘PIB passage key to unlocking mega oil, gas investments’

The passage of the long-anticipated Pe¬troleum Industry Bill (PIB), a proposed law aimed at over¬hauling the Nigerian oil and gas industry, will attract mega investments into the industry, Ernest Nwapa, executive secretary of the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board has said.
Nwapa said at the pres¬entation of a book entitled ‘Petroleum Law and Sus¬tainable Development’ on Thursday in Lagos, where other stakeholders and ex¬perts expressed concerns over the continued delay of the passage of the PIB, that there is the need for the Na¬tional Assembly to expedite action on the bill and pass it into law.
“Passing the PIB will bring mega investments. But we can’t afford to have investment
of $100 billion into the country and $89 billion is taken out. The work we are trying to do is so that we can retain much here,” said Nwapa.
Dayo Ayoade, senior lecturer, energy law at the Faculty of Law, University of Lagos, in his review of the book, stated that 106 years after the commencement of petroleum exploration in Nigeria, and over 50 years of commercial exploration, the Nigerian upstream oil and gas legal and regulatory infrastructure remains in a state of flux with the decade-long reform enshrined in the much-awaited PIB.
“It is confusing that the PIB is taking over ten years to run and everyone is con¬cerned. Nigeria is losing bil¬lions of dollars. Increasingly, our biggest market in the world doesn’t even want our oil, and what do we do? We really need to pass the indus¬try bill. We need to firm up the major controversy which
is on the tax aspect of the bill. We need to pass the bill, otherwise we will continue to lose grounds to Kenya, Mo¬zambique and other African countries now entering the oil and gas industry,” Ayoade told BusinessDay on the side¬lines of the event.
Emmanuel Ibe Kachik¬wu, executive vice chairman and general chairman, Exx¬onMobil Nigeria Unlimited, who chaired the event, noted that 90 percent of the nation’s revenue is derived from the oil industry, saying: “There is really an urgent call for ac¬tion in terms of how to take the industry forward and to sustain it. It is absolutely important that we realise that we do not have as much time as we thought we had. Everybody agrees that the PIB needs to be passed.”
The book authored by Fabian Ajogwu, principal of Kenna Partners law firm and Oscar Nliam, senior associate in the law firm,
focuses on the imperative of sustainable oil and gas ex¬ploration and production in Nigeria. Odein Ajumogobia, former minister of petro¬leum resources, wrote the foreword to the book.
Ajogwu, when asked why they wrote the book, told BusinessDay that they wanted “to highlight the im¬portance of having a regula¬tory and legal framework that supports the develop¬ment of the people in a sus¬tainable way. We are putting this forward so that even the PIB will have a balance between oil exploration and the prosperity of the indigenous people.
“My take on the PIB is that the version that achieves that balance should be the ultimate version that comes out. It is taking so long, but today it is good if it comes out in the next one month or two. It is not too late, but yet it is taking quite a long time,” he said.