The oil major had declared the force majeure on March 3,
2022, following a significant decline in crude receipts at the Bonny Oil and
Gas Terminal caused by rampant crude theft and vandalism.
A spokesperson of SPDC who did not want his name in print,
announced this yesterday, saying, “The Shell Petroleum Development Company of
Nigeria Limited (SPDC), operator of the SPDC joint venture, has lifted the
force majeure on Bonny export programme with effect from Wednesday, March 15,
2023.
“The force majeure was declared on March 3, 2022 following a
significant decline in crude receipts at the Bonny Oil and Gas Terminal.”
In November 22, Shell had lifted force majuere declared on
oil export programme from the terminal following a leak on the 150,000bpd Nembe
Creek Trunk Line (NCTL), one of the two pipelines that feed crude to the Bonny
Light terminal.
Nigeria had suffered severe oil losses in the last one or
two years due to the activities of oil thieves and vandals.
The country’s oil output had dropped to an all-time low of
900,000bpd in August 2022, leading to Nigeria’s knockout at some point as
Africa’s largest oil producer by Angola, according to the Organisation of the
Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) Monthly Oil Market Report for September
2022.
The oil cartel stated that Nigeria’s crude oil production
dropped from one million bpd recorded in July 2022 to 900, 000bd in August.
At the height of the embarrassing production
underperformance, the Group Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian National
Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC), Mallam Mele Kyari, had lamented that Nigeria
was losing about 95 per cent of oil production at the Bonny terminal to theft.
“I can tell you, in one line, just less than 200 kilometres,
we had 295 illegal connections and you see the data”, Kyari had said.
He had stated that Nigeria was losing nearly all the oil
output at Bonny, the town after which its premium oil grade, Bonny Light is
named after and a key export point for the country
“What is most difficult to manage today is the issue of
crude oil theft, it is real and it is happening”, the GCEO had said.
But the country is gradually recovering as production has
climbed to 1.3 million bpd owing to a rash of measures jointly taken by the
NNPC, private security operatives and government agencies to tackle crude
theft.
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