Minister of Petroleum Resources, Mrs Diezani Alison-Madueke, has said that the implementation cycle for Exploration and Production projects will start from the bidding rounds or licence renewal stage.
The minister, who said this recently, at the inauguration of NCDMB board, added that this would allow sufficient lead-time to implement any major capacity building activities prior to commencement of field development.
This arrangement according to her is to extract Nigerian Content commitments from the plans of bidders, which must comply with the provisions of the Local Content Act.
To achieve these, she said that the commitments would be warehoused in the industry-wide Data base to be administered by the Nigerian Content Development Monitoring Board (NCDMB), which will allow sufficient lead time to implement any major capacity building activities prior to commencement of field development.
“In my capacity as Chairman of the Governing Council of the NCDMB, I have provided guidance to ensure that Nigerian Content provisions are strictly complied with and where capacity does not currently exist, such gaps must be brought to my notice with clear and concrete strategies for building the necessary capabilities as a prerequisite for any applicable waivers.”
She stated that in tune with one of the key objectives of the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB), the foregoing implementation steps have resulted in a seamless migration of regulatory responsibility from Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation to the NCDMB without disruption to critical industry operations.
According to her, the industry is currently witnessing unprecedented levels of Nigerian Content commitments in engineering, fabrication, procurement, training, and subsurface work scope pursuant to the targets set out in the Schedule of the Act.
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