Production sharing agreements or contracts (PSAs), have been, from the time of their earliest introduction to the oil and gas sector, subjected to in-depth critical analyses and/or evaluations from economic, legal, and institutional perspectives. Among the most rigorous and perceptive of these evaluations, in my view, are: 1) K. Bindemann, Production-Sharing Agreements: An Economic Analysis, (Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, October 1999) 2) T.A. Ogunleye, ‘A Legal Analysis of Production Sharing Contract Arrangements in the Nigerian Petroleum Industry’, (Journal of Energy Studies and Policy, 2015) and 3) Y. Omorogbe, Contractual Forms in the Oil Industry: The Nigerian Experience with Production Sharing Contracts, 1986. The first of these listed studies is an empirical evaluation of a dataset of as many as 268 PSAs, worldwide! And, the second and third studies have focused, selectively, on Nigerian PSAs. After careful review, I find that these documents offer several cogent criticisms of PSAs, with quite a few having been repeated by others, as I do in this column. In my opinion, their most useful criticisms for present purposes centre on four salient issues.
