28-04-03 Thanks to greater efforts made to eliminate gas flaring in recent years, Nigeria has made substantial achievements in gas utilization, a high-ranking Nigerian official said. Macaulay Ofurhie, director of the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), said that an average of 60 % total gas produced in the country is being utilized daily as against 30 % in the last three years.
Ofurhie told that the development was in line with federal government aspirations of generating more revenue from oil and gas in the next five to seven years. "The aspiration of the present administration is to commercialise and monetise its abundant gas resources at an early date," he said.

According to him, the Nigerian federal government has initiated a number of gas utilization projects to realize its objectives in the gas sector. On the marginal fields project, he said, during the first quarter of this year, 31 of the 70 companies pre-qualified were awarded 24 marginal fields as announced by the Presidential Adviser on Petroleum and Energy on the Feb. 24, 2003.
"Since the announcement, the DPR and INTSOK (the Norwegian oil and gas partners) organized a seminar for all the marginal fields operators in April, 2003 in Abuja, purposely to enable a meaningful interaction between the DPR, the potential operators of the marginal fields and the leaseholders from whom the fields were farmed out," he said.

He said that the DPR had continued to ensure that all surface facility engineering projects were carried out in accordance with sound engineering practices as recommended in all relevant codes and standards in the industry, through its various elements of statutory control and requirements.
"It is imperative that our technical information base with regard to oil and gas exploration and production continues to be updated regularly," he said, adding that effective training and technical cooperation with various bodies involved in generation of codes and standards worldwide would be encouraged to enhance the department'seffectiveness in this respect.

On development of procedure guidelines for oil and gas surface facility development and operation, Ofurhie said that the DPR had continued to make progress in respect of the generation of relevant procedure guides for oil and gas facility development and operation.
As Africa's biggest oil producer with a daily oil output of about 2 mm barrels, Nigeria is also a gas-rich country with about 159 tcf of gas reserves, which are reportedly enough to power the rest of Africa for centuries. Potential reserves are estimated at between 45 tn and 100 tcf. However, each day up to 1.5 bn cf or about 40 % of the gas released during oil production is burned off in Nigeria, which accounts for more than 10 % of the total daily gas flaring in the world.