By Macson Obojemuinmoin, in Abuja
As the on-going Nigerian bid round reaches the stage at which applicants will evaluate the blocks and pick their candidate acreages, the revelation is that there are large obstacles to data access for the work that is required to be done.
Several participants in the process say there are trust issues with the teasers supplied by the Nigeria Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) at the prequalification stage compared with data obtained from the National Data Repository (NDR), an arm of the NUPRC.
Information provided by the NUPRC regarding the propectivity of fields, are sometimes at variance with the findings in the hard data purchased from the NDR.
And that is where the data is available for purchase in the first instance. There are no subsurface data at all in 13 of the 35 Niger Delta blocks on offer. In several others, there are only well logs, well header and biostratigraphic data, which are to be purchased for $5,000.
Africa Oil+Gas Report could not immediately confirm how many blocks have seismic data, let alone three dimensional (3D) seismic data, a highly sought-after data asset which, if available, can be bought for $100,000 from the NDR.
But we did ask some of the applicants this much: Doesn’t a Competent Persons Report (CPR)), which is on offer for $40,000, tell most of the story for each block?
To which they unanimously respond: “The experience of the 2020-2022 bid round has concluded that CPR produced by the NUPRC is not worth the paper they were written on”.
