Stakeholders optimistic Nigeria can finance oil, gas projects

Oil and gas industry stakeholders have said Nigeria can always get the required funds needed to be invested in the sector if she exhibits sense of seriousness and is focused on what she wanted.

This is the view of some of the participants at the World Petroleum Congress (WPC) in Moscow, Russia.

The participants, who spoke at a panel discussion on ‘Financing Investment in the Oil and Gas Industry: Challenges and Opportunities,’ said that it has been discovered that there are a lot of funds running into several trillions of United States’ dollar that are available for investment in the oil and gas industry globally, but that such funds could only be deployed to areas where the environment is conducive and friendly for investments.

Nigeria needs over $60 billion to invest in the oil and gas but the controversy surrounding the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) is seen as a hindrance. This is because international oil companies have held on to their money pending when the bill would be passed.
Anthony Pitchman, who spoke to BusinessDay on the sidelines of the event after the panel of discussions, said, “We discovered that there are lots of funds that are available which can be invested in the oil and gas sector. The estimation was that in the next 20 years the industry would require trillions of dollars globally”.

He said it has been established that funds are available to support all the projects that have been earmarked to be carried out at different locations around the world.

“But the environment must be friendly and attractive for investment for such funds to flow in that direction”, he said.

Also commenting on the discussion of the panelists, Attahir Yusuf, the group executive director, commercial and investment, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), said there has always been money to fund the oil and gas industry in Nigeria.
He explained that funding the oil and gas industry could be carried out in different ways such as equity financing, bonds and project financing.
On equity financing, he said the country can finance its projects through such arrangement because it does not have enough money.
“We can go for projects financing, there are criteria for that, and there are peculiar projects for that, so also bond”, he said.