Nigeria oil reform on way ‘within 6 months’

Nigeria

LAGOS, November 18, 2020 – Nigeria’s long-anticipated oil reform bill will be passed within six months, the speaker of the country’s House of Representatives said on Tuesday.

In September, sources told Reuters that the Nigerian National Petroleum Company would be privatised under the draft Petroleum Industry Bill. The NOC would be transformed into a limited liability corporation, operating as a commercial entity without access to state funds.

The bill is also expected to freshly amend late-2019 changes to deepwater royalties and replace certain regulatory agencies with new entities.

“Today, the Nigerian offshore is no longer a frontier,” Chief Timipre Marlin Sylva, Nigeria’s minister of state for petroleum resources, told The Energy Year earlier this year. “It is now a proven territory, so we are now saying that we need to look at the laws again and see how we can make some changes in certain areas.”