The return of marginal oil field bids many years after seems to throw up some positives especially the unveiling of top brains and experts in the rare sector such as Rivers-born Dr Leesi Gabrial Gborogbosi.
Nigeria last opened bids for marginal oil rounds over 18 years ago, and whatever expertise that had accrued seems to have since evaporated. Thus, the opening of the 2020 bid rounds which attracted 600 bids has been making a lot of waves.
Gborogbosi has about three decades of leadership experience in the oil and gas industry. His doctoral dissertation focuses on strategy implementation, collaboration, the role of middle managers, and the dynamics of social movements. He leverages his professional experience as a Certified Management Consultant (CMC); Fellow, Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria; and The Institute of Management Consultants, to render strategic insight into marginal oil bid processes and incidentals.
Gborogbosi is the Founder/CEO of Gabriel Domale Consulting (a management consulting firm), set up after many years with a top IOC. In Domale Consulting, he is responsible for all aspects of the firm’s strategy, business development, leadership, governance, competitiveness, teams, and operations across all network of client offices.
Over the course of about three decades working in a global oil and gas company prior to founding Gabriel Domale Consulting, he has served in a variety of leadership and managerial roles, including most recently as finance manager of a portfolio of complex gas capital projects.
It is significant to note that he was a member of the corporate strategy, planning, budget, and reporting team. He has collaboratively led finance transformation and knowledge management sessions, quarterly projects performance reviews, investment appraisal, and business planning with a focus on capital efficiency, cost and milestones deliveries for a portfolio of seven projects for a culturally diverse global audience.
So, when Gborogbosi spoke last week in an exclusive interview with BusinessDay (which was run in BD Sunday), most industry watchers stirred in their corners because he is believed to have touched sensitive insights needed by marginal field bidders and their consultants.
The expert gave cost ideas, advising investors who would be successful at the pre-qualification stage to treat the costs up to the point of winning the bid as search costs. “In the 2020 marginal field bid round, the total search cost is N47m (approx. US$130,235) excluding signature bonus.
He said the cost include costs for registration, application and bidding per field: N5,500,000 (approx. US$15,235) as registration fee – N500,000; application fee – N2,000,000 and bid processing fee – N3,000,000) and [B] – costs for data prying, data leasing, Competent Person’s Report and Filed Specific Report : US$115,000 (approx. N41,515,000) as data prying – US$15,000; data leasing – US$25,000; Competent Person’s Report – US$50,000 and Filed Specific Report – US$25,000.
“Signature bonuses will be paid as per the applicant’s winning bid. The signature bonus should be estimated to be included in the investment proposal. The US Dollars to Naira equivalent is derived using the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) current exchange rate of the US Dollars to Naira of N361/$1.”
From his wealth of industry experience and his nativeness rooted in the oil region, he gave what he considered an investment approach. He ended with his chosen best templates for bidders which any discerning bidder would want to look at twice.
On the best templates to be used, Gborogbosi advised winners to consider what he called front-end planning right from the onset; plus the right financials and dataset that could sustain the operation of the marginal field lifecycle. “I will recommend that the investment plan for the marginal field should contain 10 key sections namely: executive summary that should provide summary information on the content of the investment proposal. “This section is key as it enables decision-makers to have an overview of the investment decision points.”
Dr Gborogbosi could be one of the evidence of the emergence of a new crop of Niger Delta brains that form a human capital reserve base expected to stand up and take over the oil industry and rescue the oil region. This is because many insist that nobody from the moon will come to rescue the region and their resources.
