Business

Nigeria: Govt to Sanction Oil Firms for Non-Submission of Daily Output

The Federal Government, through the Department of Petroleum Resources, yesterday, said it will sanction any of the 48 crude oil producing companies in Nigeria that fails to submit its daily report on production and export to the National Production Monitoring System (NPMS) portal domiciled with the regulatory agency.

NPMS is an online platform to accurately monitor national crude oil-production and export through the provision of a system for direct and independent acquisition of production data from oil and gas facilitie.

It replaces the paper-based report and ensures ready production reporting to the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) and other agencies. The portal was launched in 2016. Speaking at a sensitisation workshop organised by DPR in the presence of two representatives from each of the 48 crude oil-producing companies in Lagos, the acting Director of DPR, Ahmad Rufai Shakur, noted that all oil-producing companies would now be held liable for non-compliance as they were statutorily required to submit production data through the portal.

This is to enable the department effect a comprehensive real-time reporting of the nation’s daily production status to the government, he said. Data to be submitted, according to him, include daily production report, monthly report on producing wells, MER results, well test reports, lifting reports, daily associated gas and non-associated gas production reports and terminal reports.

Shakur said, “We have observed over the years that some operators are yet to comply fully with data submission via the NPMS portal in contravention of the provisions of Section 43 and 52 of the Petroleum (Drilling and Production) Regulation 1969 (as amended). Companies are required to obtain a hardware USB security key (dongle key) which enables data submission to the platform.”

The acting director who was represented by the Assistant Director (Upstream), Akpomudjere Okiemute, explained that DPR would henceforth tie NPMS data submission compliance to some of its regulatory processes such as issuance of export permits, technical allowable, as well as other statutory approvals and permits. The Manager (Upstream), Victor Georgeru, said the NPMS facilities enabled DPR to exercise surveillance, perform production monitoring and utilised the production data for analysis and forecasting.  Daily Trust