Recent data has shown that despite incessant militant attacks on oil facilities, Nigeria kept exporting crude oil at a largely steady pace in May.
The militant attacks on it the country’s oil infrastructure drove output down to 30-year lows, which helped boost the global prices of oil.
Data from maritime intelligence firm Windward and Thomson Reuters showed a far smaller drop in exports from April to May than most in the market had expected. It suggested that Nigerian oil production is more resilient than many thought.
Its oil industry has been grappling with a spate of militant attacks that took out the Forcados crude oil stream in February and affected Bonny Light, Brass River and Escravos in May mainly by targeting pipelines taking crude to export terminals.
An accident on the terminal exporting Qua Iboe, its largest oil stream, further dragged down production and led the International Energy Agency (IEA) to declare May production at 30-year lows of 1.37 million bpd.
However, Windward showed May exports dropping by just 62,000 barrels per day (bpd) from April, with exports still reaching 1.89 million bpd.
Windward tracks all exports coming from Nigeria including crude oil, condensates and ship-to-ship transfers, so its figures are nearly always higher than estimates of crude oil production alone.
But its figures indicate that Nigeria exported between 300,000-500,0000 bpd more than what OPEC and other agencies thought it had produced in May.
