A whopping N37 billion worth of petroleum products have been lost as the nation battles to tackle rising spate of militant attacks in the Niger Delta, so says the Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Mr. Mohammed Barkindo.
Giving a deeper insight into the loss, the NNPC boss added that out of his amount, N18 billion (or about $120 million) was the value of petroleum products lost as a result of the shut-in of flow stations belonging to different multinational oil companies.
About N19 billion was also spent on the repair of oil facilities destroyed during the attacks, he said. The repairs were carried out under the supervision of the NNPC.
The NNPC GMD gave this shocking revelation at the Chief of Naval Staff Annual Conference (CONSAC) which ended last week in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State capital even as he added that the load shedding being experienced in the country is as a result of disruption of production activities by militants.
“The attacks on the infrastructure have been persistent in recent times, impacting oil, gas and petroleum products infrastructure,” said the NNPC boss. “Some recent attacks on gas facilities include ELPS (Escravos-Warri) pipeline, attacked on May 14, Ogbolobo-Focados crude /condesent line attacked on June 12 and the recent attacks on Chevron facilities leading to complete severance of gas supply for Chevron. The combined effect of these attacks is power outage of about 1.1GW of electricity,” he explained.
Appraising the global impact of the Niger Delta militancy, Barkindo said: “On a global basis, Nigeria ranks within the first 10 in terms of crude oil reserve and within the top 12 in terms of daily crude oil production capacity in barrels of oil equivalent. This position underpins the importance of the Nigerian oil and gas industry both to Nigeria and to the world in general,”
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