Daily Independent (Lagos)
Adeola Yusuf
8 July 2009
Lagos — Nigeria's revenue base on Tuesday kept on eroding with the latest attack on Chevron's offshore production adding to the plummeting level of the country's income by N2.2 billion ($15,172,413.8)
The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) last Sunday night attacked the strategic Okan manifold, which controls about 80 percent of Chevron Nigeria Limited off shore crude oil to its BOP Crude Loading Platform.
The militant group, which swiftly claimed responsibility for the attack added on Monday that it had also seized six crewmembers from a chemical tanker Siehem Peace at about 20 nautical miles from Escravos in Delta State.
Chevron had prior to this latest attack, shut down its operations around Delta State after Mend's first attack in its latest campaign on 24 May, halting around 100,000 bpd.
Meanwhile, the recent serial attacks by MEND and other militant groups on oil facilities have punctured the country's oil production capacity and would hinder its drive to grow its oil reserves to 40 billion in 2010.
A document, which the Daily Independent obtained from Rigzone (an international website) showed that the country's "income level is going down daily.
At the summary of the latest attack on Chevron's Okan manifold, it shows that Nigeria loses N2.2 billion ($15,172, 413.8) daily.'
The Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) had released the performance chart of the nation's downstream and upstream industry for the first quarter of the year, January to March in which the nation's average daily production rate was 2,080,132 bpd and 2,024,418bpd for the months of January and February 2009.
174 fields were, according to it, on production while 127 remained shut in adding that the non-reconciled production deferment for January and February 2009 was 1,101,488; translating to 475,705bopd deferred in January while 625,783bopd was deferred in February.
It pointed out that the large deferments figure resulted from militants' activities and operational hitches. Shell Petroleum Development Company, DPR said recorded the highest volume of deferment of 434,280bopd due to insecurity and gas flaring restriction while Mobil lost 87,752bopd due to attack in QIT.
MEND had in the last three months extended its fight against the federal government to the oil companies.
The group had recently attacked Afremo B oil platform of Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) in retaliation for the alleged invasion of an Ijaw community in Warri South-west Local Government Area of Delta State by the military Joint Task Force (JTF) penultimate Thursday.
It also three Sundays backed attacked Shell pipelines at Adamakiri and Kula, both in Rivers State in the Eastern Niger Delta.
It said it had also attacked the Afremo offshore oilfields, which it believed were operated by Shell, and which it said were 14 miles (23 kilometers) from an export terminal through which oil from Shell's Forcados fields was pumped.
The attacks are the first to strike Rivers State, the Easternmost of the three main states in the Niger Delta, since the militants launched their latest campaign of sabotage following a military offensive in the western delta last month.
Persistent attacks by Mend over the past three years have cut oil output in the OPEC member, the world's eighth biggest oil exporter, to less than two thirds of its installed capacity of 3 million barrels per day.
MEND first burst onto the scene in 2006, knocking out more than a quarter of Nigeria's oil output -then around 2.4 million bpd -in a matter of weeks.
Italian oil giant, Agip had said that a pipeline attack in Bayelsa State had halted production of around 33,000 barrels of oil and 2 million cubic meters of gas per day.
Similarly, Shell said some oil production had been halted following an attack on the Trans Ramos pipeline penultimate Wednesday at Aghoro-2 community in Bayelsa State.
MEND had dubbed its offensive "Hurricane Piper Alpha' after the North Sea oil platform that blew up in July 1998 and was the worst offshore oil disaster, and warned that it might attack deep-water facilities off the Nigerian coast.
In all, about 132 oil fields were said to have been shut while the country is currently losing 1.9barrel of crude oil per day. Its current production is within the region of 1.1 barrel per day of crude and thus puncturing the country's quest to realize 4million barrel of crude oil by 2010.
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