Incessant pipeline closures lead to oil production decline – Experts

Adebayo Obajemu

The federal government’s bid to maintain uptick in oil production has failed due to incessant pipelines closures.

According to Ambrose Omokhordion, an oil & gas analyst and chief research officer at Investa, this development has made it impossible for the government to realise its objective of boosting exploration and production and increase oil reserves to 40 billion barrels and output to 3 million per day.

According to him, these incessant closures have plunged Nigerian crude oil output to nearly three decades low in the recent weeks.

Dr. Olufemi Omoyele director of Entrepreneurship at Redeemers University also said the intermittent closures have impacted negatively on production, adding that the fields supplying Bonny Light and Qua Iboe, which are the two leading export grades, were closed for maintenance in May but regular supply was gradually returning.

He also stated that Trans Forcados and Nembe Creek pipelines had been repeatedly sabotaged, and the flow through them has been intermittent throughout the past month.

Despite being Africa’s largest oil producer, Nigeria has been contending with several security, operational, and technical problems in its major oil infrastructure since early 2021, with Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission revealing the country witnessed a 14 per cent month-on-month fall in crude and condensate production in May, translating to a 1.279 million b/d drop in output.

Nigeria’s crude and condensate production has dropped to almost 50 per cent of its production capacity, which stood at about 2.2 million barrels per day.