FG Begins Fresh Bid Rounds For Oil Blocks.

Federal Government says it has commenced the 2024 oil bid rounds in accordance with the provisions of the Petroleum Industry Act.

It announced this in Abuja at the first edition of the NEITI House Dialogue organized by the Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, where the Nigeria Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission also revealed that it made N4.34tn revenue in 2023.

Speaking at the event, the Chief Executive, NUPRC, Gbenga Komolafe, said, the oil licensing rounds were designed to enhance quality data set and would be conducted in a fair, transparent and competitive bidding process in a non-discriminatory manner as stipulated on Sections 3 and 74 of the PIA.

He said, the nation would earn billions of dollars from the assets in terms of royalties, taxies and other levies to be generated from the bid round, adding that, government currently putting on offer 12 block, and the commenced a bid process in 2022 where we put 17 offshore assets on offer but as the date grew close to the last election we had to put a hold on it.

This is coming after the PIA has outlawed discretionary award of assets and so the award of assets now go through a fair, competitive and transparent process, while, the NUPRC grew its revenue from N2tn in 2020 to N2.9tn in 2021. This rose to N3.78tn in 2022 and climbed further to N4.34tn in 2024.