Nigeria, Africa’s largest producer, is producing 1.67 million barrels per day of oil, it has been announced.
Group Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL), Mele Kyari, disclosed this during a special Finance Ministry briefing led by the Honourable Minister of Finance & Co-ordinating Minister of the Economy, Wale Edun, on Friday, September 1, 2023
He attributed the feat to the economic re-engineering efforts of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, noting that the country has faced an enormous amount of security challenges, but Tinubu has reengineered the security approach which has made significant positive changes in the oil sector.
His words: “I was just checking the data for Wednesday for crude oil and condensate production, it is at 1.67 million barrels per day, this is substantial if you look at the situation where we were almost going below a million barrels per day about a year and some months ago and this is quite substantial.
“I also confirm that Mr. President has taken significant steps to de-bottleneck the industry in such a way that these resources can come into place of them is the tax reform.
Today, this industry is operating under 13 different taxes, and I know that the reform team was already looking to see how the fiscal environment in this critical sector is stable because no one invests in this industry without a line of sight of at least 10 years of fiscal stability.
“With that, we are already seeing interest in people wanting to come and invest in our industry and those who are already with us, coming back to invest, otherwise, if you have instability and security challenges, businesses usually don’t come. But we are happy today that the interventions are working both in terms of security and providing the fiscal stability basis for companies to invest is already showing up and this is also reflected in NNPCL’s current ability to meet its obligations to its partners which we were failing to do before May 29, 2023 because we were trying to accommodate fuel subsidies.
“I can confirm that by November 2023, we will be on a clean slate.”
A report by Nairametics indicated that in July 2023, Nigeria produced 1,081,396 barrels of crude oil per day, meanwhile, it produced 38,258 barrels per day of blended condensate and 174,509 barrels per day of unblended condensates.
All these made up a total of 1,294,162 barrels per day for the highlighted month.
Meanwhile, the country is still battling crude oil theft across the oil-producing regions of the Niger Delta.
Since the second quarter of 2023, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) has reported cases of crude oil theft incidents, sometimes running into hundreds of cases every week.
Nuhu Ribadu, the country’s National Security Adviser (NSA) has also recently said that Nigeria is losing 400,000 barrels of oil daily to thieves. This is worth about $4 million in value.
