Nigeria’s oil reserve dropped slightly to 36.966 billion barrels as of January 2023 just as the gas reserves grew slightly, said the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC).
The Commission Chief Executive, Engr. Gbenga Komolafe, who disclosed this yesterday at the Nigeria International Energy Summit in Abuja, blamed the low exploration activities for the 0.22 per cent drop in oil reserves. The reserves as of January 2022 stood at 37.046bn barrels.
Citing the National Hydrocarbon Reserves Position, Komolafe said, “Nigeria’s oil and condensate reserves as at January 1, 2023 stands at 31.060bn barrels for oil and 5.906bn barrels for condensate, making a total of 36.966bn barrels for oil and condensate.”
For the natural gas reserves, the NUPRC head said it grew to 208.83 trillion cubic feet (tcf), which is about 0.10% improvement from the 208.62tcf recorded as of January 2022. “For the latest record, associated gas reserves is 102.32tcf, non-associated gas reserves is 106.51tcf making the total of 208.83tcf of natural gas reserves”.
Further commenting, he said: “The oil and condensate reserves decline of about 0.22% compared to January 01, 2022, figures is attributable to low exploration activities and reserves revision arising from subsurface studies in the year 2022.
“The slight increase of 0.10% in gas reserves over January 1, 2022 reserves position is primarily attributed to the revisions arising from additional information from new wells, and field development studies.”
Komolafe said NUPRC is developing a regulatory framework for carbon-pricing systems to make businesses pay for their emissions and incentivise emission reductions through carbon credits while it has created the Energy Transition & Carbon Monetisation department.
The national gas flaring programme bid process for 49 flare sites with a combined volume of about 300 million standard cubic feet of gas daily will be concluded this month, Komolafe noted.
Source: https://dailytrust.com/