The Senate has tasked President Muhammadu Buhari to ensure that the nation’s oil and gas sectors are computerised to curb multifaceted challenges.
The Senate said oil and gas in the country was faced with lot of challenges in the aspects of production, transportation, and sales business.
To evolve better ways to curb the challenges, the Senate has detailed its joint committee on petroleum up stream, downstream and gas resources to convene a public hearing on the matter.
This, the Upper Chamber said would ascertain the quantity of oil and gas produced daily and the quality control mechanism engaged by NNPC.
Also, the Senate among other roles mandated the committee to determine the amount of waste of petroleum products through pilfering, pipeline vandalisation and leakages, and international best practices of computerized oil and gas business management, including pipeline protection and quantity and quality control.
The motion on the matter was sponsored by Senator George Sekibo (PDP, Rivers East) and 29 other lawmakers.
Tagged the need “need to install computerized oil facilities management gadgets for Nigerian crude oil businesses,” Sekibo said it was of concern that while other countries in the same business venture have gone digital for the past 50 years, Nigeria is still using analogue technology in doing its petroleum business.
“We still use human beings (4 persons) to monitor a kilometer of pipeline, giving undue opportunities to oil pilfered, giving rise to unnecessary pipeline explosion, causing deaths and unquantifiable loss of products and other human valuables,” he said.
Regretting that Nigeria with over 61 years in oil business, Sekibo said the country could not give account of total amount of products produced, sold, wasted and lost through pilfering, or pipeline vandalization.
According to him, petroleum products business should have been given priority attention in terms of protection, expansion, quantity and total quality control especially with oil as the mainstay of Nigeria’s income and foreign reserves.
He said Nigeria is the biggest oil producer in Africa with maximum capacity of of about 2.5 million per barrel, but noted that, “this meager quantity is always under attack through pipeline vandalism and oil platform theft which has reduced quantity produced”.
“One key area of fighting corruption is through effective management of resource itself, that is the source of revenue just as this administration emphasizes on the fight against revenue pilfering by the operators”.
“The computerization of oil management system assist in the pipeline protection, trigger off alarms when any section of the pipeline is disturbed for whatever reason. The system detects if there is a weak section, captures suspected intruders on the pipeline, and are equipped with fire fighting gadgets in the event of fire outbreak,” he said.
Solomon Ayado, Abuja
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