The Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission, Mr Gbenga Komolafe, says the agency was targeting the first half of 2022 for marginal field awardees to begin drilling in an effort to find their first oil.
He says the process which commenced in 2020 had been bogged down by bureaucratic challenges, meaning that the actual drilling for oil has yet to effectively take off over a year after the awardees were officially handed award certificates.
Komolafe says although the commission inherited a difficult situation, it expects that by the first half of this year, all the issues would be sorted out.