From 1.28 million barrels per day in April, the Group Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, Mele Kyari, says Nigeria’s oil production was inching towards 1.7mbpd as of Saturday.
This is as the NNPCL boss hinted that the country that critical gas infrastructure projects are ongoing to ensure the transport of 8 billion stock of gas daily through an extensive pipeline network within the next four years.
Kyari spoke during a stakeholders’ engagement between the Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists and the NNPCL held in Lagos on Saturday. According to Kyari, the nation’s crude oil production keeps dropping due to oil theft and vandalism.
The NNPCL boss emphasised the need to fight insecurity in the oil and gas sector to increase production. “How do you increase oil production? Remove the security challenge we have in our onshore assets. As we all know, the security challenge is real. It is not just about theft; it is about the availability of the infrastructure to deliver the volume to the market. “No one is going to put money into oil production when he knows the production will not get to the market. Within the last two years, we removed over 5,800 illegal connections from our pipelines.”
