Robert Egbe
ECONOMIC saboteurs are destroying the 150,000 barrels of oil per day Nembe Creek Trunk Line (NCTL), Aiteo Eastern Exploration and Development Company of Nigeria Limited (Aiteo) warned on Sunday.
The firm said the attacks are “persistent, sophisticated and appear timed to inflict to decimate its oil production output in the short and possibly medium term”.
The NCTL is one of Nigeria’s major oil transportation arteries that evacuate crude from the Niger Delta to the Atlantic coast for export.
According to a statement by its representative, Ndiana Matthew, the firm said the number of barrels lost to these incidents, almost compare in volume to Nigeria’s total daily production.
It said: “These attacks are persistent; sophisticated; appear timed to inflict debilitating and disruptive effect, all indisputably calculated to decimate Aiteo’s production output in the short if not medium term.
“Regrettably, these vicious and malicious exertions by individuals and faceless entities are having that unavoidable effect.
“The disruptions that these attacks have brought about have led to direct, irretrievable and significant losses in production and, consequently, have created revenue deficits that directly impact all the stakeholders across the relevant value chain. The consequences say nothing of the significant negative and inherently damaging effect that these malicious infractions have on the environment.”
According to it, in 2019 alone, Joint Investigative Visits (JIVs) comprising security and regulatory agencies as well as community representatives and Aiteo personnel to ascertain the cause of the breaches to the NCTL, found that “98 per cent of all incidences were attributable to third-party infractions alone!
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“The number of barrels lost to these incidents, almost compare in volume to the country’s total daily production. By this level of sabotage, the NCTL has been shut down for 61 days this year alone, constituting 83 per cent cause of downtime in this year only. Over the last four years, more than 200 shut down days have been recorded on the asset.”
It noted that industry sources forecast that Nigeria will be producing at least 2.5m barrels per day (BPD) by the middle of 2020, mainly by fixing damaged pipelines and dealing with security problems.
“In the face of this extremely high level of deliberate sabotage, it seems clear that there are interests within the country that seem determined to scuttle this aspiration,” the statement said.
Aiteo urged the country to confront this “continued sabotage of critical economic oil assets…with all resources available to the country as a whole.
“The losses to us as a commercial concern are significant and potentially irreparable: the losses to Nigeria through the deprivation of revenue as a direct enabler for the improvement of the quality of life of our people is so much greater. The disastrous subsistence of this malaise must be permanently resolved – now!”
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