The Nigerian National
Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has said the daily crude oil production may hit
2.3 million barrels in the next two weeks.
The source who spoke on the
condition that his name would not be disclosed in this report, explained that
the backchannel overtures initiated by Minister of State for Petroleum
Resources, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu to halt bombing of oil facilities and disruptions
in production by militants in the Niger Delta were already yielding results.
He said, based largely on
the resilience of operators in the country’s oil fields, repair of vandalised
facilities have been largely completed and production resumed.
According to him, operators
are already ramping up their production levels and could within the second week
of July hit 2.3mbpd, perhaps some few weeks ahead of Kachikwu’s earlier
projection of August as a cut-off date to restore Nigeria’s production to about
2.2mbpd.
Kachikwu had last month said
he hoped to in his dialogue with militants in the Delta, end the destruction of
facilities; restore production and ramp up the countries volumes to insulate
the 2016 budget from taking a bashing from low revenue from oil.
The country had indexed its
2016 budget on price level of $38/b for oil. Currently, oil prices averaged
$47/b on news of Britain’s decision to exit from the European Union after its
Thursday referendum.
“Largely on the back of
resilience of the operators; the speed with which they fixed those pipelines
and come back into business and restore production levels and start to ramp
them up to try and compensate, these resulted in that,” said the source when
asked about how the country seemingly maintained a healthy production level
despite attacks that had left operations uncertain since February.
He further stated: “We are
already just a little below 1.9mbpd and hopefully in another week or two we
should be ramping up to about 2.3mbpd which is what the minister shared in the
conference at the Transcorp.”
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