Nigeria: Oil Minister Odein Ajumogobia
Nigeria oil minister urges exploration
Nigeria's petrol minister urged oil companies to look beyond current market volatility and pump more money into exploration, saying the demand for crude could double by the middle of the century.
Odein Ajumogobia said Nigeria's oil and gas reserves were at the same level they were at five years ago even though fresh fields had been identified.
"It is my belief that we must continue to replenish and grow our reserve base and not allow market uncertainties to distort our decision to explore more," Ajumogobia told a meeting of the Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists in the federal capital Abuja.
"There has been no appreciable growth in Nigeria's oil and gas reserves in the past five years despite the known potential both onshore and in the deep offshore," the minister added.
Oil prices have been fluctuating wildly in recent months with the cost of a barrel passing the $140 mark this year but now down to little over $50 amid the global economic slowdown, said an AFP report.
But the minister said global demand for energy was bound to grow in the long term, pointing out that there are presently about 7 billion people using more than 228 million barrels of oil equivalent of primary energy a day.
"By the middle of this century there could be over 9 billion people using twice as much energy as we are using today," Ajumogobia said.
Nigeria claims reserves of 33 billion barrels of oil and 187 trillion standard cubic feet of gas. It is targeting oil reserves of 40 billion barrels by 2010.
But Ajumogobia warned that the only way to meet that target is "to make use of all available geo-technologies to de-risk the prospectivity and step up exploration activity in other Nigerian inland basins."
Nigeria used to be Africa's biggest crude oil producer although it has recently been caught up by Angola.