Nigeria’s largest indigenous oil and gas firm, Oando Plc said pipeline attacks in the Niger Delta over the past year have led to a revenue shortfall of up to $750 million across its joint venture operations.
Among others, Oando has a JV with Energia on the Ebendo field which feeds through to Focados export terminal, with its largest JV the Nigerian Agip Oil Company (NAOC) near the Brass terminal which has been affected all year with disruptions.
“What we are dealing with are criminals hiding under the platform of social issues,” Pade Durotoye, chief executive of Oando Energy Resources, told Reuters on Tuesday on the sidelines of an African oil and gas conference in Cape Town.
“So this equates to somewhere between 50,000 to 60,000 barrels per day (bpd of lost production), not just to us but all of the partners.”
Nigeria’s oil output, typically close to 2.2 million bpd, fell to less than 1.3 million bpd this spring before recovering as militants, such as the Niger Delta Avengers, bombed energy facilities and warned international oil companies not to carry out repairs.
Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday met leaders from the Niger Delta and representatives of militant groups who have been attacking oil facilities in the region.
Oando’s Durotoye said a military solution to root out the criminals shouldn’t be too difficult to manage.
“You are not dealing with an insurgency, you are not dealing with a whole region of people going out and breaking our lines – it is very few, in the hundreds so its something that can be very easily be handled,” he said.
He said the vast majority of people involved in the attacks were not even from the swampy Niger Delta, and it had become an “industry” attracting people from across the OPEC-member.
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