THE Federal Government has concluded arrangements to establish an oil and gas institute in Bayelsa State as part of ongoing negotiations to tackle developmental problems in the Niger Delta region. The Minister of Science and Technology, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu, made the disclosure, yesterday, when he visited Yenagoa, the state capital, for some official engagements.
While paying a courtesy visit to Governor Seriake Dickson, Onu said the institute would be sited in Odi, a community in Kolokuma-Opokuma Local Government Area, which suffered military invasion under former President Olusegun Obasanjo. Onu, who was received by the Deputy Governor, Rear Admiral John Jonah (retd) said the institute, when established would improve manpower in the Niger Delta and reduce unemployment in the country. He said the proposed establishment of the institute in Bayelsa was strategic because of the contributions of the state to oil and gas sector in the country.
The minister said the institute would enhance development of skills among the people of the region to stimulate the local economy and create activities in the oil-producing communities. He said: “The institute will not only create jobs and improve skills, but it will also create wealth. We need to develop capacity in oil and gas processes in the country”. The minister, who was also in Odi, to inaugurate the ultramodern Bioresources Laboratory complex and the livestock feed milling complex at the Bioresources Development Center (BIODEC), said the government was deploying technology to monitor pipelines and track the country’s oil.
He said the laboratory would be deployed to investigate pipeline breaches following its capacity to embed fingerprints in oil. He said with the facility oil theft would soon be a thing of the past, as the fingerprinting would enable the country to track its crude oil anywhere when stolen and solve the problem of economic sabotage. Onu said the fingerprinting of the country’s crude oil would begin at the end of the year insisting that the technology could be deployed in the country. He said: “This lab, the ultramodern laboratory, I feel very happy; for me, Nigeria is changing. With this capacity here now, we will be able to do many things.
“I just gave them an instruction that by the end of the year, we should have fingerprinting of our crude oil, so that if anybody steals it, we will be able to identify it, because even crude oil can have fingerprints and with the equipment we have here, we can do it in Nigeria. “One problem that we have is that we rely on outside, from other people to solve our problems. We produce crude oil, we export it, but we now import refined petroleum products.