Despite the significant oil theft that has recently been reported, crude oil still made up 80% of Nigeria’s exports in the second quarter of 2022.
According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) most recent report on merchandise trade, crude oil exports from Nigeria, valued at N5.9 billion, accounted for 80% of all exports made by the country during the time period under consideration.
According to Mele Kyari, group chief executive officer of Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, the nation had recently seen an upsurge in the activities of pipeline vandals, leading to a spike in crude oil theft. Late this month, Kyari said in an interview that the nation’s poor crude oil output was caused by theft resulting from pipeline vandalism in the Niger Delta.
According to him, 295 illegal connections had been located around the pipelines, which led to the shutdown of production.
“When you say we are losing 700,000 barrels of crude oil per day, we mean it. There is no company that will produce and lose 80 per cent of its crude oil that will continue to produce.
“So we deliberately shut down the pipeline whenever we see these infractions getting to a limit we cannot control. That means as we speak today, we know that there are at least 700,000 lock-ins that we could have produced that we can’t do because we can’t guarantee the safety of the pipelines.
“While we agree that some of the oil losses are due to technical issues, a larger percentage of it is due to theft. It is impossible for any oil company to continue to operate in such an environment.
“None produces oil for the next person to continue to steal it. If you produce and someone continues to take it, the wise thing is for you to stop the production. This is why we can’t produce.”
Nigeria’s crude oil output in July was roughly one million barrels per day, down from 1.2 million barrels per day reported in June, according to the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) report for August. Nigeria’s production was increased by OPEC in September from 1.826 mb/d to 1.830 mb/d. The crude oil output in Nigeria averaged 1.8 million barrels per day from 1.973mb/d to an all-time high of 2.475mb/d in November 2005, according to figures on the country’s oil industry.
Nigeria’s total trade in the second quarter of 2022 was N12.8 billion, which was greater than the N9.7 billion recorded in the same period of 2021 but lower than the N13 billion recorded in the first quarter of 2022. Total exports were N7.4bn, of which re-exports stood at N9.6bn, while total imports stood at N5.4bn, according to the NBS report.
In the quarter under review, total exports increased by four per cent when compared to the first quarter of 2022 (N7.1bn) and by 47 per cent of the value recorded in the second quarter of 2021 (N5bn).
On the other hand, total imports decreased by eight per cent in the second quarter of 2022 when compared to the value recorded in the first quarter of 2022 (N5.9bn) and grew by 16 per cent when compared to the value recorded in the corresponding quarter of 2021 (N4.6bn).
Re-exports in the second quarter of 2022, which stood at N9.6bn, decreased when compared to the same quarter of 2021 (N6bn) and also, in the first quarter of 2022 (N115.8bn) by 85 per cent and 92 per cent respectively.
