The Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) have made it clear that the industry is likely to shut down should the coronavirus pandemic affects its operations.
According to Sarki Auwalu, Chief Executive Officer at DPR, in an interview recently, he said aside from the ongoing pandemic, the industry already has a wide range of issues bordering on oil licensing, compliance with production quotas, gas-to-power, as well as other regulatory issues.
The DPR boss said the coronavirus upsurge is something that has had a huge impact on the energy balance of the world.
He said once people cannot move, aircraft cannot fly; once energy demand is low, definitely the industry will go low.
He revealed that is careful as it relate with a lot of international oil companies, international service providers, as people fly from different parts of the world and work in the facilities that we monitor.
“If the virus gets into our operational areas, we will have to shut dow. If we shut down in this era of low oil prices, it will be double jeopardy.”
He said before the number of cases rose to the number it is now the Department had made provision for hand sanitizers everywhere in the facilities while it monitor and take precautionary measures.
Speaking about the issue of costs been usually padded, Auwalu said the Department has a unit called economic value and bench-marking and they developed a solution like software which would aggregate the cost.
“By law, every company, every year will come and make presentations to us about their work programme and under this work programme, we take cognizance to ask who spent what, which we use to develop the economic value and benchmarking.
For investments that have government interests, we now say that for any approval for field development, we use an archive to see the cost.
“Right now, we have values and that is why we call it to value and benchmarking. Definitely, you will see people resisting and this is a fact, and that was why there was a time we wanted to see how we can reduce the value by some certain percentages because we have empirical data in the sense that we will not approve the field development plan till we now see the economic value.
This is because before now, we do not have empirical data and that is helping a lot greatly.”