Iran Energy News Oil, Gas, Petrochemical and Energy Field Specialized Channel
Related Articles
Exxon will boost crude oil production in Nigeria by an additional 40,000 barrels per day, Nigerian President Bola Tinubu’s spokesman Ajuri Ngelale said in a statement on Tuesday.
Nigeria has long had aspirations for increasing its crude oil production, most recently promising to boost production to 1.7 million barrels per day by November of this year.
But now, Exxon is pledging to boost production on its end, according to Nigeria, who was citing information from Exxon’s president of global upstream operations. Exxon’s promises could put more weight behind an announced production increase.
“Nigeria has never been more ready for business than it is now,” the spokesperson’s statement read, quoting President Tinubu.
Nigeria is OPEC’s largest producer in Africa. Its OPEC production quota was lowered earlier this year to 1.38 million bpd—from 1.742 million bpd—when it failed to meet its quota under the agreement due to repeated challenges with oil theft, pipeline vandalism, and lack of investment in capacity. The problem has been recently quantified by the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), which estimates that Nigeria lost to theft more than 615 million barrels of crude oil valued at more than $46 billion in the decade ending in 2020. That’s more than 140,000 bpd.
Nigeria’s planned production for next year is 1.578 million bpd, although its stated capacity is 2.5 million bpd, according to the chief executive at the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC).
Nigeria’s crude production was up in August from July levels, but still below the 1.320 million bpd that it reached in June. Nigeria’s August production came in at 1.269 million bpd, according to OPEC’s secondary sources published in the latest edition of its Monthly Oil Market Report.
NUPRC announced earlier this month that it was planning an international investment roadshow to attract cash to its extractives sector.
