DPR to commence full digitalisation of 2,616 oil producing wells — official

The full digitalisation of over 2,616 oil producing wells in the country for transparency and accountability will begin soon.

The Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) Production and Surveillance Deputy Manager Mr Victor Georgeson said this on the sideline of the agency’s sensitisation workshop organised on National Production Monitoring System (NPSM) for oil and gas operator’s compliance officers in Lagos.

“It’s a new DPR today under the watch of Ahmad Shakur as Director who emphasised on effectiveness, transparency and accountability in the oil and gas production and crude export data base.

“We are going digital, so what you are seeing is paradigm shift in what we want to serve to the country.

“The NPMS which is an online portal whereby every company producing oil and gas would lodge in what they are producing so that we as regulator will be able to collate them analyse and store them for all stakeholders who need it.

“Those stakeholders include Federal Government for planning revenue and other international organisations like OPEC and others.

“We want to do it and do it right, in the new spirit of DPR. That’s why today we gathered all the operators to sensitise them on the need to participate on it.

“Because we cannot achieve success without the operators, and if they failed to comply with the new instruction, we have to apply full sanction.

“Now, we have told them they understand what to do and how to do it, we believe they will partner with us to do it right,’’ he said.

Georgeson said that the compliance took effect immediately, adding that the agency had trained all the 48 producers.

He said that the only few of them who were yet to log into the portal had promised to comply with the regulation.

He assured that the agency would ensure compliance among the operators, adding that the digitalisation process for data gathering commenced since 2016.

“We started the digitalisation process for data gathering since 2016 from that time we awarded the contract for those who built the model.

“Today is to mark fully, because no company will produce if you are not on the platform, this is a directive from the DPR in line with Section 43 of the drilling and production regulations 1969 as amended and should be complied with and all oil producing companies.

“Maximum Efficient Rate Test (NER) is one of the agency statutory function which was in line with Section 38 © of the regulations, you are not expected to produce any well with conducting the test, it is a test to determine the optimal rate to produce a given well,’’ he added.

Georgeson said that the agency supervised test which is often conducted twice a year, for the first half of the year which start in September to close on Nov. 30, with the report submitted to DPR which has up till December to analyse it.

“The laws require DPR to analyse the test report and come out with technical allowable rate assigned to each well, as at today we have 2,616 well producing in Nigeria.

“So, we have to assign the technical allowable rate they should produce on each of the well.

“If they produce more than that they will be penalised, which the law says they we relinquished the over production to government.

“The second half of the test started from March to 31st of May, while DPR analyse and release the result on July 1.

“So, those operators without the required test model will not make DPR to generate the technical allowable rate,’’ Georgeson said.