The Nigerian Navy has arrested 14 suspects involved in oil theft and also uncovered an illegal oil refining site with a capacity to produce over 9.6million litres of Automotive Gas Oil (AGO) per day in creeks around Elem Krakama in Degema Local Government Area of Rivers State.
In an exercise conducted by the Nigerian Naval Ship (NNS) Pathfinder, on Thursday, the Navy seized four wooden boats with a storage capacity of 7,000 metric tones while siphoning crude from a tapped oil wellhead owned by the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC).
Commander of NNS PATHFINDER, Commodore Desmond Igbo, while conducting journalists on a tour of the location where the illegal activity was carried out on a wide scale, identified the field as Oil Mining Lease (OML) 18, owned by NNPCL and the wellhead badly compromised by the suspected oil thieves was Well 15 in the same oil field.
Igbo, who expressed shock at the wide-scale economic sabotage going on in the location, noted that the site has 16 cooking pots with the capacity to contain 6,000 litres of AGO each while assuring that the Navy will not relent in ensuring that illegal oil refining activities become a thing of the past.
"We have made arrests, we arrested about 14 of them in the act of stealing the crude and also illegally refining this crude.
"Behind me is oil wellhead 15 belonging to OML 18, of NNPCL. You can see a very big 14-inch hose connected illegally to this oil well head 15. They are transferring it to this big wooden boat also known as the Cotonou boat.
"The boats contain 70 metric tons of crude oil, the crude is still there; they will connect it to the reservoirs through the 4-inch hose, from there, they will start cooking it.
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"We have four of these (Wooden boats) in this camp. The cooking pots also contain about 1.5 million AGO. This is not good for our country, not good for the economy."
Igbo noted that the success was in furtherance of the Chief of Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Emmanuel Ogalla's mandate to them to fish out the economic saboteurs and not to deter in ensuring that oil theft in Niger Delta become history, emphasising that they will continue both day and night and not rest on their oars to stamp out oil theft in the region.
He, however, revealed that both the arrested suspects and seized crude would be handed over to appropriate agencies for prosecution.
He added that his personnel would dismantle the illegal connection, just as he noted that the attention of the owners of the oil field has been drawn to clampdown the spilling wellhead.
The NNS Pathfinder Commander said: "Sometimes you can not quantify it. It is actually economic sabotage. The cooking pots, we are going to crush them and we have already told the company the OML 18 owned by NNPC to clamp down the wellhead permanently so that they cannot come back and engage in it and they said they would do so. We are hoping that they would do that and we will give them the necessary security and safety they would need to do that."
He also called on community leaders to warn their youths to desist from such criminal activities.
