The oil and gas industry globally has witnessed its most tempestuous experience in history in 2020. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic from Wuhan, China, and its threat to lives and businesses led to the introduction of lockdowns and other stringent restriction of movement measures across cities of the world.
The train 7 was said to deliver at least $20 billion of net revenue per annum for the federation and create about 12,000 direct and 40,000 indirect jobs to Nigerians. It is also a contractual framework between the network operator and network users, serving as an important negotiation component of the gas business and transactions in the Nigerian domestic gas market.
The 2020 national budget had to be reviewed in order to keep it in tandem with the unfolding economic realities. The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation at the time, declared that a number of Nigerian crude vessels were hovering the sea with no buyers in sight, and even at some point, was begging buyers to take Nigerian crude.
A coalition of 33 industry operators led by the NNPC contributed $30 million to help the federal government combat the virus in the country under three thematic areas of Provision of medical consumables; Deployment of logistics and in-patient support system; and Delivery of medical infrastructure. But the marketers who had studied the document conveying the deregulation, pointed out some contradictions which they were not comfortable with.
With the steady recovery of crude price, facilitated by the sustained production cuts by the Organisation of Petroleum Countries and its allies, the federal government in September, finally surrendered the fixing of petrol price. It said the decision was to allow cost reflectivity to prevail in the downstream petroleum sector. That action led to the rise of petrol pump price to N162 per litre, and subsequently, to N168 per litre.