Reported plans by Nigeria to move away from holding annual contracts for the lifting and sale of its crude oil grades, to longer term contracts have been sidestepped by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), THISDAY reports.

The NNPC disclosed this last week in Abuja when it opened the bid documents submitted by 254 firms looking to be considered in Nigeria’s crude oil lifting contracts for the periods 2018 to 2019. Nigeria, in January 2017 disclosed through the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr. Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu that it would replace the annual crude oil lifting contracts with long-term contracts from which selected companies and traders would lift her crude oil for periods longer than one year.

However, in his response to a question on why the corporation opted to continue with the short-term lifting contract after Kachikwu said it would move away from it, the Group Managing Director of the NNPC, Dr. Maikanti Baru, said its decision to continue with the short-term contract was informed by market fundamentals. He said the corporation considers that new opportunities would continue to emerge at intervals which it would not want to shut out, adding that it would conduct another bid round for oil liftings in 2019 and 2020.

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