The Nigerian government says it expects not less than $500 million from the signature bonuses and sale of marginal oil fields.
Sarki Auwalu, the Director at the Department of Petroleum Resources stated this on Friday when he featured on an ARISE News programme The Morning Show.
Auwalu announced that in 2003 DPR awarded contract for 24 marginal oil fields to individuals and companies, but only 13 were producing while government revoked 11 owing to non-productivity.
“In the application, you can see that the application and processing fee, we have five million per field. We have 477 applications, and the cost of data prying and data leasing is an average between $65,000 to $115,000 so that’s what has already been made out of the process,” Mr Auwalu told ARISE News.
“Then for the signature bonus, you know it’s a competition. There are outliers that will put a crazy amount, whether it’s high or low, so what we did internally is to look at the CP Report that is the Competent Person Report and objectively estimate the average signature bonus on that field.
“After all the good and valuable consideration for every asset is being computed by DPR, so we used that as an estimate to guide us on the average signature bonus that we expect, which some fields are high some are low.
“So, that is what we put together and we estimate to have not less than $500 million which is very on the conservative side.”
