Federal Government on Thursday hosted a delegation of Spanish Investors led by the visiting minister of Spanish foreign affairs Jose Manuel Albares, to highlight investments opportunity in the Nigerian Petroleum Industry.
This is coming on the heels of a recent announcement for a mini-bid round for seven oil blocks by the federal government.
Chief Timipriye Sylva, the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, who hosted the visiting investors noted that Nigeria needs all the investments required as the oil and gas sector is at the core of the nation’s economy.
“The Minister described Spain as a strategic partner with Nigeria in the area of oil and gas trade, and stressed that their discussion centred around the development of gas, security in the petroleum industry and technology among other issues.
“A partner and customer of NLNG from inception. So you can see that this meeting is actually a meeting between partners. And of course, as you see, the minister came into Nigeria so early in the year, I’m very certain that it’s the first foreign minister that is visiting Nigeria this year.
“We need all the investments when we require as the oil and gas sector is at the core of our economy. And if he comes in with all this array of investors. These are major companies, and major investment opportunities for this country, and if the minister comes with this array of potential investors, then I’m sure that we have the potential of having a lot of investments coming into Nigeria.
“We are focused on the development of gas. We have a lot of gas resources and we need these resources to be developed. I told the minister that we have today proven gas reserves of up to over 200 trillion cubic feet of gas. We also believe that with focused exploration for gas, we can increase these reserves to up to 600 TCF, that’s a lot and of course, how do we focus on the exploration for additional gas reserves? We need investors and how we develop this gas also need investors and Spain is one country that we are looking towards to bring investments into this sector."