Nigeria’s crude oil export for last month averaged 2.2 million barrels per day, nearly 100 per cent of the 1.2 million barrels per day in January, last year.
The figure, industry source said, excluded production retained for internal refining but now battered by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) for refined products due to domestic refining capacity outage.
The Minister of Petroleum Resources, Dr. Rilwan Lukman, disclosed that production increased since the third quarter of last year when the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) also posted production from all units at the same rate.
Confirmation of the actual export figures as against output figures by the Central Bank of Nigeria, a source said, was being awaited to measure the actual revenue performance of the petroleum industry at the opening of the year.
Revenue receipts from export of crude oil and condensate account for over 95 per cent of total foreign exchange income of the country, over 90 per cent of total revenue support to the federal budget and over significant liquidity in the internal economy.
Lukman said Nigeria’s oil production stabilised at 2.2 million barrels per day, attributing production recovery from the 2009 bottom below one million barrels per day to Presidential amnesty packages for militants in the Niger Delta.
According to him, the amnesty deal and the subsequent truce allowed the country to pump more oil, regretting however that inadequate funding for joint-venture projects remained a threat to optimization of output potentials.
The Minister, while celebrating the nation’s production recovery, was quick to point out that Nigeria had remained committed to its production ceiling of 1.704 million barrels per day at the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
Despite the quota which limits Nigeria to production of 1.7 milliion barrels per day (mbd), the country has sustained production ramp up from 1.75 mbd in August, 1.85 mbd in September, 1.87 mbd in October, 1.9 mbd in November and 2.0 mbd in December.
Lukman insisted that the actual crude oil output was within the confines of the OPEC output quota for the country, explaining that the rest of the production and export was condensate.
He said condensate, a natural gas liquid used in blending crude oil to get a lighter and sweeter grade, was not included in the output restriction by OPEC, adding that the commodity accounted for the bulk of the nation’s over production.
Prior to the downturn in the activities of the petroleum industry due to militant activities in the Niger Delta, Nigeria was pressing for increased OPEC quota to reflect her rising profile in reserves and production capacity.
The nation’s petroleum industry is under a policy mandate to raise cumulative crude oil reserves to 40 billion barrels and production to 4.0 barrels per day.
However, meeting the aspiration has been fraught with funding, security and fiscal issues as the industry wheels around a critical reform bend.
The Petroleum Industry Bill, evolved to address most of the problems through a reform process is criticized by the investing operators who complain that the fiscal terms proposed in the bill were too tight to recommend the required investments.
The bill also proposed to phase out the government’s burden of funding equity interests in joint ventures through incorporation of the joint ventures to be financially autonomous, and migration of similar agreements to production sharing contracts.
Meanwhile the 2010 cash call provision for the joint ventures, expected to be the last one to appear in the federal budget, has continued to generate issues between the NNPC and the National Assembly over jumps in the figures.
Lukman said the $5 billion proposed in the 2010 budget for funding government’s equity interests in the joint ventures was not enough to fund proposed projects, reiterating the need for alternative sources of financing.
However, in a different presentation, NNPC stated that over $10 billion was proposed for 2010 cash call response to meet funding commitment to joint venture and gas pipeline projects in the year.