The company had earlier been promising expensive participation in all manner of projects in hopes of winning officials over to their side in the dispute over the Nigeria-Sao Tome and Principe Joint Development Zone block allocations, where XOM ultimately turned down two 25 percent alolocations in any two of the five blocks on offer in the 2004 round, most of which were eventually won by ERHC Energy.
ExxionMobil had repeatedly delayed the awards as it issued demands that it be allowed to bid after the deadline and actually become the operator with JV partner Anadarko of Block 4. Operatorship and some 60 percent of Block 4 was awarded to a consortium of Noble Energy and ERHC Energy, both of Houson, instead.
The story in today's Guardian is the first in a long time on the XOM subsidiary Mobil Oil of Nigeria's future activities in the region, where it faces any number of probes for bribery, corruption and cheating the governments where it operates:
American oil firm, Mobil, forecloses investment in Nigeria's refineries
by Sulaimon Salau
DESPITE attempts by the Federal Government to woo oil multi-nationals into equity participation in the nation's refineries, Mobil Oil Nigeria Plc said it would not invest in onshore refineries.
The company based it reason on the poor state of the nation's four refineries located in Port-Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna respectively.
Chairman, Managing Director of Mobil Oil, Mr. Olumide Onakoya, said the comatose status of the nation's refineries made them to be investment unfriendly.
Onakoya, who was speaking at the company's yearly general meeting held Tuesday in Lagos, said Mobil has done so much to resuscitate the plants but yet the situation remains static.
This development, he said would not allow the company to invest in such facilities since profit will not be guaranteed by the company.
Among other things, he said, "we have been working very closely with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). In 1998, we made research and recommendations to NNPC on Warri refinery to improve its technical efficiency, but regrettably, nothing has been done by the government. The way our refineries are today, we cannot invest our shareholders' fund on such investment that will not yield profit."
Although, he noted that the refineries are "great national assets" that must be protected and ensure that they are in good form.
Earlier, Onakoya, in his speech to shareholders, said that the efforts on deregulating the oil and gas industry had only experienced limited progress due to reluctance to embrace a change in the sector, allaying hope that deregulation would inevitably come to the petroleum downstream sector and bring improve competition, higher operating standards and increased customer focus and value pricing.
He also noted that despite the encouragement on regulatory control and subsidies in the downstream petroleum sector over the years, the result has been that our refineries, supply and distribution infrastructures like petroleum jetties, pipelines and depots have become inefficient due to inadequate investment.
The Mobil boss, therefore urged that, beyond privatising the refineries, the entire supply and distribution infrastructure should be fully privatised to enable the country attract the necessary investments that would unleash its full potential in the sector.
Meanwhile, the Group Managing Director of NNPC, Dr. Funso Kupolokun, had recently in Lagos expressed that all the refineries in the country are now working, noting that none of them is working below 80 per cent capacity.
Experts had, however, attributed the problems of the refineries to unadherence to specified standards and incompetent hands handling the projects.
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