No fewer than 168,000 fishermen in 350 communities of Bayelsa and Delta states were affected by the 2011 Bonga oil spills. In 2011, an oil spill from Bonga offshore, operated by Shell Nigeria Production and Exploration Company, left the communities devastated.
The Managing Director of the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) Limited, Mr. Babs Omotowa, has called for the deployment of an accelerated development model in producing and utilising Nigeria’s vast gas deposit.
The sale of onshore assets by International Oil Companies operating in Nigeria, including Shell and Chevron, has been largely triggered by security risk and the increasing shift by the oil majors towards the offshore region, industry experts have said.
Indeed, oil multinationals that were wholly committed to the shale projects are now having a rethink, as the projects become more uneconomical by the day. Shale oil producing countries, such as Turkey, Ukraine and Argentina, Romaian , Poland and Hungary, Germany and South Africa, are now left at crossroads on the way forward to oil boom.
This may be as a result of the non-passage of the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) and the uncertainty in the crude oil market. Specifically, as at November and December last year, only Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) and Addax carried out exploration/drilling activities during the months under review.
Revenue received by the federation from crude oil sales, Petroleum Products Taxes (PPT), and royalties (after subsidies provided by Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and cash calls) has decreased from $45 billion in 2011 to $32.3 billion in 2014, according to International Monetary Fund (IMF) Country Report on Nigeria.
