Nigeria to pass oil reform bill by May

Nigeria’s parliament expects to pass the country’s long-awaited Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) by April or May, a Senate official said on Monday.

Senate President Ahmed Lawan told a parliamentary session that the PIB would be passed within Q2 2021, with lawmakers aiming for April or May.

In September, sources told Reuters that the Nigerian National Petroleum Company would be privatised under the draft 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 last 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.”

Read The Energy Year’s latest interview with Chief Timipre Marlin Sylva.