The guiding philosophy of the Africa Oil+Gas Report is to highlight the involvement of the continent’s technical minds in the exploitation of her resources and to put on notice, to all our readers, the governing environment that determines whether these resources aid the emergence of the industrial society, or keep ordinary Africans in perpetualwant and servitude.
It’s interesting, then, that around the same time our editors were preparing a special edition to focus on
the human capacity challenge, the Nigerian Petroleum Ministry submitted an ambitious, 223 page legislation, christened The Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) to the country’sNational Assembly.
That challenged us. The PIB ranks, alongside the Algerian Hydrocarbon Law, as the most ambitious piece of legislation on the hydrocarbon industry in any jurisdiction on the continent. It is going to change the status quo from crude oil production taxes to gas pipeline regulations.
We have always enjoyed interpreting issues, rather than claiming that we are breaking news. That is why we have begun, with this edition, an ongoing analysis of the PIB. It so happens, as we wait for the legislature’s debate and passage of the PIB, there are other, relatively new laws in the country, that may impact licensing of oil and gas acreages than we know now. Adeoye Adefulu, Energy Partner in the legal firm of Odujinrin and Adefulu, explains, from page 24, how the Nigerian local content act and the Public Procurement Law restrain the Petroleum Minister from granting discretionary awards.
There are regulars, including, of course, including our widely cited updates of Ghana’s very dynamic Activity Map and our newly introduced East African E&P Map.
The Africa Oil+Gas Report provides peerless perspective and insight on policy issues and technical innovation, backgrounded by high quality energy intelligence to guide everyone from the prospecting E&P company to the project finance institution.
