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Nigeria Loses N313bn As Oil Theft, Shutdown Rise
Rising oil thefts and employees’ strikes have led to an enormous drop in Nigeria’s oil manufacturing output, culminating within the lack of a whole bunch of billions of naira in oil earnings.
Crude oil manufacturing in Nigeria crashed by over 9 million barrels between March and April 2023, resulting in a cumulative income lack of about N356bn.
Business operators blamed the plunge in oil manufacturing on the latest strike by some oil employees, which warranted the shutdown of manufacturing at chosen wells for a interval, in addition to the theft of crude by thieves.
They, nonetheless, referred to as for harder investigations, as they alleged that some individuals at oil export terminals could possibly be culpable within the theft and fraud at these terminals.
Additionally they identified that this could possibly be the explanation why President Muhammadu Buhari gave an order final week directing the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Fee (NUPRC) to observe crude oil manufacturing by taking up the regulatory oversight of crude oil export terminals nationwide.
An evaluation of the most recent oil manufacturing figures obtained from the NUPRC indicated that whereas Nigeria’s output in February was 1,306,304 per day, it fell to 1,268,202 per day in March, earlier than crashing to 998,602 barrels per day in April.
This confirmed that between February and March, the nation misplaced 38,102 barrels of crude oil each day, representing a complete of 1,181,162 barrels for the 31 days of March.
Additionally, between March and April, Nigeria’s oil manufacturing crashed by 269,600 barrels per day, which interprets to a complete of 8,088,000 within the 30 days of April.
Nation Economic system, a world statistical agency, put the common price of Brent, the worldwide benchmark for oil, in March 2023, at $78.43/barrel.
Due to this fact by shedding 1,181,162 barrels in March, Nigeria misplaced a complete of $92.64m (N42.71bn on the official alternate charge of N461/$), in the course of the interval below evaluation.
Equally, information from Statistica, one other worldwide statistical agency, confirmed that the common price of Brent in April was about $82/barrel, that means that Nigeria misplaced $679.4m (N313.2bn) final month, because of the 8.1 million barrels drop in oil output.
A summation of the month-to-month losses indicated that Nigeria misplaced a complete of about 9,269,162 barrels of crude oil valued at N355.9bn in the course of the two-month interval.
