The Nigerian Petroleum Development Company is set to boost the nation’s crude oil production by additional 100,000 barrels per day from 2015 after tortuous negotiation with host communities from where Shell Petroleum Development Company divested five oil fields from.
The NPDC which is the production arm of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation NNPC said First oil is expected to be delivered from OML40 this week. It would deliver between 2000 and 2,500 barrels per day.
This is expected to increase to 5000 barrels after it would have successfully drilled two wells this year. The entire field was shut down before the divestment.
The five fields are expected to be 70,000 barrels per day this year. The fields from which this is to come are OMLs 30, 26, 40, 42, and 34.
By current price of crude oil which stands at $107 per barrel the 70,000 barrels would bring the revenue portfolio of the stakeholders including the Federal Government which has 55 per cent in the fields a total sum of $7.490 million or N1.159 billion per day.
Already one of the fields Oil Mining license (OML) 30 which is the biggest of all the fields is now producing 50,000 barrels per day, 10, 000barrels above its initial capacity. This was after it production went to zero level owing to some technical and community crisis between Shell and the host community. Its facilities have been rehabilitated and community at peace with the company.
Explaining to BusinessDay the reasons behind the delay in the production of the fields, Victor Briggs, managing director of NPDC said that the state of the facilities when his company took over the assets were appalling and that the company had engaged a quick win approach to ensure that those assets begin to produce.
Almost 300 kilometer of pipelines , flow stations, flow lines , compressors are vandalized according to him.
“We have to rehabilitate flow station so that it would work for us to be able to open up the wells so that we can get production,” he said.
He said for now what the company is doing is to rehabilitate the assets and gradually investing in building more assets.
He explained that Shell left some of these assets in 2006 which the NPDC inherited, adding that the first two assets which are OMLs 42 and 26 were given to NPDC in 2012 while another two were handed over to it in January 2013, and the last asset was handed over to the company in February 2013.
