Photo caption: Olu Arowolo Verheijen
By Emeka Ugwuanyi
The Special Adviser to the President on Energy, Olu Arowolo Verheijen, has confirmed that the Federal Government is committed to ensuring energy security and efficiency and to achieve this, it is focusing on attaining production targets of three million barrels per day (bopd) of crude oil and 10 billion standard cubic feet per day of gas by 2030.
According to her, the Federal Government through its policy is removing all bottlenecks that might militate against achieving these output aspirations. It is ensuring that investments in Nigeria’s upstream sector are not hindered, expedited contracting cycle and preventing corruption through award of contracts to briefcase contractors. The briefcase contractors lack technical and financial competencies and also don’t have infrastructure and facilities to execute the jobs given them. They seek companies that have the capacities and capabilities to execute the jobs, add their percentages and transfer the contracts. This unwholesome practice is said to be a major reason cost of projects execution and delivery in Nigeria’s upstream is the highest in the world.
Cutting off the middlemen and giving the contracts directly to companies that have the competencies will drastically reduce the cost of projects execution and delivery in Nigeria as these middlemen or briefcase contractors add as much as 30 per cent to the actual costs of jobs or projects.
Verheijen in her keynote address entitled ‘Streamlining Project Delivery for Improved Efficiency’, delivered at the 14th Practical Nigerian Content Forum organized by the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB) in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, with the theme “Securing Investments, Strengthening Local Content and Scaling Energy Production,” highlighted all the efforts being made by the Federal Government and results achieved.
She said: “Efficient project delivery sits at the core of Nigeria’s upstream energy reforms. Project economics must remain competitive, timelines must be credible, and capital must be deployed with confidence. And a pragmatic, outcome focused local content regulations plus guidelines must be an accelerator of these objectives. Local content was never meant to be an end in itself; it is intended to be a means to a national outcome, projects delivered at scale, on schedule, and at competitive cost.
“This is why President Tinubu issued Presidential Directives 41 & 42 in February 2024, focused on local content compliance requirements, eliminating briefcase intermediaries, reducing petroleum-sector contracting costs and timelines, improving the ease of doing business, and repositioning Nigeria as the premier investment destination for oil and gas in Africa. The combined reforms introduced over the last two years enabled Nigeria to secure three of the four major FIDs recorded in Africa in 2024 and propelled us into the top quartile among 14 comparable global oil and gas jurisdictions.
“Achieving streamlined project delivery demands collective effort; it is not the responsibility of a single actor in the value chain. Federal and state governments, private sector players, financiers, local communities, all must work in aligned cooperation to guarantee project success.
“On our part as government, we have approached this responsibility with clarity and intention. In crafting our Presidential Directives, we adopted a data-driven modelling and benchmarking process to understand precisely how local content requirements influenced overall project costs. Our task was to design a system that eliminates rent-seeking while preserving the true meaning of local content: empowering Nigerian talent, enabling indigenous enterprise, strengthening national competitiveness.”
Government’s policies, she said, led to three major final investment decisions (FIDs) recorded in the last 18 months: TotalEnergies’ Ubeta gas project, Shell’s Bonga North deepwater development, and Shell’s HI gas project.
She listed what the NCDMB have achieved through in-country value retention including fabrication yards such as SHI-MCI; thriving free zones like LADOL; modular refining pioneers like Waltersmith.
“The Egina FPSO raised the bar for local engineering and fabrication, achieving about 55,000 tonnes of in-country fabrication, representing nearly two-thirds of its total fabricated scope. NLNG Train 7 stands as another powerful illustration of what Nigerian content can deliver, with extensive local fabrication and engineering now underway. The Nigerian Oil and Gas Parks Scheme, spearheaded by the NCDMB, is creating dedicated manufacturing hubs to produce essential equipment and components for the industry,” she added.
“Ultimately, our national objectives remain clear: to achieve three million barrels per day of crude oil and 10 billion standard cubic feet per day of gas by 2030. To get there, we must unlock every viable project. Regulators must shed legacy mindsets and act as enablers of speed, clarity, and efficiency. Financing models must become more innovative and more ambitious. The Nigerian Content Intervention Fund must expand both its impact and its dynamism,” she said.
