Senate Set To Consider PIB

After a prolonged delay, the Senate said last week that it  is set to start voting on wide-ranging reforms to the mainstay oil industry after a joint committee, which has been reviewing the Petroleum Industry Bill finished its work.
According to a report by Reuters, the PIB will re-write Nigeria’s decades-old relationship with its foreign oil partners, altering everything from the fiscal framework for offshore oil projects to the involvement of indigenous firms in the sector.
The legislation has been held up for years, going from revision to revision and committee to committee as industry executives and government officials barter over its terms.
Foreign oil firms have said billions of dollars of potential investment in Africa’s biggest oil and gas industry are on hold amid uncertainty over the proposed legislation.
A joint Senate committee, which has been considering the bill for the past year, has concluded its work, paving the way for the upper house to begin voting on the legislation clause by clause.
”The joint committee on PIB has laid the report on the table in the Senate. We have concluded work on it. It is now the property of the Senate,” said the co-chairman of the joint committee, Senator Osita Izunaso.
”In the next few weeks, the Senate will consider it clause by clause,” he told reporters on the sidelines of a conference in Abuja.
A joint committee in the lower house of parliament is still working on the legislation and must present its report before the lower chamber can also vote on each clause.
Any discrepancies must then be harmonized by another committee before the bill will be finally passed.
Meanwhile, the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke, has said that the various gas policies initiated by the Federal Government are being aggressively pursued.
The minister said this in a keynote address titled, “Strategies for the Successful Implementation of Gas Sector Policies,” at the Nigerian Gas Association’s 7th International Gas Conference and Exhibition in Abuja, on Monday.
Alison-Madueke said that the commercial framework of the new gas pricing regimes for gas to power and gas to manufacturing industry, had bolstered more investors to come into the gas sub-sector.