Shell Tuesday criticised Nigeria’s oil bill fashioned to reform the oil and gas sector, saying mistakes in it, if passed into law, will take years to correct.
“The simple, passionately stated priorities of government have been completely lost in a cumbersome document that lacks insight into the very basics of our industry,” Shell’s vice president for Africa Ann Pickard said.
“If passed in the form currently proposed, its mistakes will take years to correct,” Pickard told participants at the ongoing Nigeria oil and gas conference.
She said that the bill should address issues of multiple taxes, royalties and other concerns of the international oil companies (IOCs) and other stakeholders before it is passed.
The bill is still before the national assembly.
“Nigeria is too rich to be poor. Let us build on our mutual resources, people and vision to get the policy and actions in our industry right,” she added.
Senators from six of Nigeria’s oil-producing states, Amnesty International, some other right groups and IOCs also criticised the bill last year.
They said it did not address social and human rights impacts of the oil industry, environmental degradation and participation of local people in the industry.
Pickard also reiterated Shell’s decision not to pull out of Nigeria.
“Take it from me, Shell has no plans to pull out,” she said, in reaction to recent local media speculation on the issue.
Pickard said Shell had achieved a lot since 2005, including supplying of more than three quarters of Nigeria’s domestic gas and building a new power plant that increased national grid capacity by about 20 percent.
But she lamented that oil and gas production has failed to grow in Nigeria since 2005.
“(Nigeria’s) share of global oil production is shrinking with it — it has fallen just over 30 percent since 2005,” she said.
Shell, one of the main oil operators in Nigeria, has seen part of its almost one million barrels per day output cut because of strife in the Niger Delta, where militia movements claiming to represent the interests of local people have attacked oil installations and kidnapped oil workers.