Mr. Kachikwu also revealed that some members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) are scheduled to meet with Russian officials in Moscow on March 20, 2016, in a bid to stabilize tumbling crude oil prices.
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Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil producer, but the industry has been hit by the declining worldwide oil price.
In the lecture, themed “Technological Advances in Hydrocarbon Exploration and Exploitation: Solutions to Global Oil Price Stability”, the minister said NNPC had been moved from a loss position of N160 billion to some N3 billion by January 2016.
Nigeria has introduced foreign exchange controls and import bans in an effort to maintain the value of the currency, the naira, in the face of pressure over the declining oil price.
“Both the Saudis and the Russians, everybody is coming back to the table”, Kachikwu said.
He said: “So, at the end of the day, a CEO of an upstream company must deliver me upstream results and we are very focused on that and along those chains, we are doing very dramatic things within the sector to bring the change”. “That’s a target that we have”.
While Russia confirmed its readiness to take part in the talks, the time and date of the meeting is still being discussed, according to a statement on the website of the nation’s Energy Ministry.
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari on Sunday stepped up rhetoric on the issue, telling Qatar’s ruler crude prices had fallen to “totally unacceptable” levels.
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corp (NNPC) will be split into 30 independent companies in the forthcoming weeks, Minister of State for Petroleum Products, Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu has stated.
The pick-up follows a week of gains for the battered commodity, which in January was wallowing near 13-year lows below United States dollars 30 a barrel owing to overproduction, a supply glut and a slowdown in the global economy.
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Worldwide benchmark Brent futures lost 6 cents to $36.87 a barrel by 1200 GMT, while USA crude futures edged up 6 cents to $34.72.
