The new Director in charge of Nigeria’s Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), Billy Aghah, says Nigeria earned N312 billion (about US$2 billion) from oil between July and September this year.
Aghah told journalists on Thursday in Lagos that Nigeria’s oil reserve would hit 40,000 billion barrels by 2010.
He explained that the target was inevitable because the current oil reserves of Nigeria had reached 38.6 billion barrels.
Aghah said, however, that the DPR agency was auditing the Nigeria’s oil and gas to determine the actual reserve and what the oil and gas companies were remitting.
’’As I am talking to you, the committee members are in my office working on how to determine the oil and gas reserves the country has,’’ Aghah said.
According to him, the Nigerian government is considering giving oil companies that have gas fields permit to drill wells so as to give room for more gas in commercial quantities.
He said that the Nigerian government had also given three new licenses to private concerns interested in Liquefied Petroleum Gas.
On the state of Nigeria’s four refineries, Aghah said the current average capacity utilization of the refineries was 6.6 percent.
He attributed the dismal performance of the refineries to the crisis in the Niger Delta which witnessed rampant vandalism of pipelines carrying crude oil petroleum products..
Source African Press Agency
