As the marginal oilfields awardees strategise to develop and bring their allocated oil blocks to production, Peter Uzoho writes on the need for them to draw lessons from one of the previous marginal fields’ awardees and current operator of Egbaoma field The development of oilfields into first oil or gas production poses a lot of challenges to the operators. Companies that lack the needed fund to deploy to field, the right technical competence, efficient cost management and unable to collaborate with the right partners often see themselves chickening out of the venture, leaving the fields fallow.. The challenges are quite diverse, ranging from funding, fiscal terms, partnership issues, availability of enabling facility, issue of pricing and off-taker, for gas, as well as political, governance and environmental hurdles. These challenges are partly responsible for the inability of the 11 of the 24 marginal oilfields awarded to oil companies during the 2003/2004 marginal fields bid round to be developed till date, leading to their revocation and now in litigation.