By Ishaya Ibrahim
Deputy managing director, Deep Water District, TOTAL Nigeria, Ahmadu-Kida Musa, has disclosed that the multinational oil company is set to add 200,000 barrels of oil per day to Nigeria’s crude oil production by the end of 2018.
In the last three months, Nigeria’s crude oil production has hobbled between 1,500 and 1,800 barrels per day production, a shortfall of about 500,000 barrels per day.
Nigeria’s production benchmark in the 2018 budget is 2.2 million barrels per day, and with the shortfall in production, the deficit in the government’s budget keeps expanding.
At the annual conference of the National Association of Energy Correspondents (NAEC) held in Lagos on August 16, Musa, who was the chairman of the occasion, said Total Nigeria would be adding 200,000 barrel per day to the existing production output.
“Our Egina Deepwater development project, which is nearing completion, will add 200,000 barrels of oil per day to Nigeria’s production by the last quarter of this year,” he said.
He said in the last five years, TOTAL Nigeria has invested approximately $10 billion in the country’s oil and gas industry.
The conference theme was PIGB, emerging issues and concerns.
Group managing director of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Maikanti Baru, presented the lead paper. He was represented by Roland Ewubare, group general manager, National Petroleum Investment Management Services.
He said the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB), which this 8th National Assembly split into four smaller and more defined bills, one of which is the Petroleum Industry Governance Bill (PIGB), has the lofty vision of separating the regulatory policy and commercial roles of the NNPC.
Baru said whilst the bill seeks to create an avenue for better investment opportunities to the oil and gas sector by splitting NNPC into two entities, it might create tension among the various unions in the industry if not properly communicated to the staff.
Chairman of NAEC, Olatunde Dodondawa, said the choice of the theme was informed by the issues around the PIGB, which was aimed at providing stakeholders the opportunity to address them.
