The Minister of state for Petroleum Resources and the Group Managing Director of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, Ibe Kachikwu, says the NNPC would be restructured and divided into 30 companies that will generate revenue for the country.

Each of the 30 companies is expected to have its own managing director.

Kachikwu made this known on thursday while speaking at the 25th Oloibiri Lecture Series and Energy Forum in Abuja, with the theme: “Technological Advances in Hydrocarbon Exploration and Exploitation: Solutions to Global Oil Price Stability”.

The minister said: “We are starting first with simple governance issues; those that are not contentious, that are very rapid and that deal a lot with the transformation of the national oil company.”

“For the national oil company, a lot of work is going on; I am sure some of you have seen the effects; but within the next one week, we are going to be announcing some real major overhaul of the system, one that hasn’t been done in over 20 years.”

“For the first time, we are unbundling the subset of the NNPC to 30 independent companies with their own Managing Directors.”

“Titles like Group Executive Directors are going to disappear and in their place you are going to have Chief Executive Officers and they are going to take responsibilities for their titles.”

“At the end of the day, the CEO of an upstream company must deliver an upstream result and we are very focused on that and along those chains, we are doing very dramatic things within the sector to bring the change.”

“Production Sharing Contracts (PSC) terms haven’t been revised for quite a while, we will be looking at those, JVs, and we will be focusing more on how we can bring in the PSC-type terms into JV structures, so that way, we can begin to get them to work.”

Again the minister expressed hope that the price of crude oil will rise to $50 per barrel in the not too distant future.

“I don’t need to tell you about the price of oil, despite the shuttle diplomacy here and there. It is still very challenging but at least we are inching up, and for the first time, we are beginning to have both the Saudis and the Russians come back on the table.”

“Hopefully, if the meeting that we are scheduling to happen in Russia between the OPEC and non-OPEC members happen around the 20th of March, we should see some dramatic movements. We are not likely going to see the prices of many years ago, but I think we are very humble today to accept that if we hit the price of $50, we will be celebrating and that is the target that we have.”