Uncertainty over actual volume of crude oil produced by Nigeria on daily basis is over with the launch of computer applications that allow for tracking the volume of crude oil produced, the vessels and the destinations the crude is taking.
This is part of the several reforms the Department of Petroleum Resource (DPR) embarked on in order to bring the Nigerian oil and gas industry at par with its counterparts across the globe.
The DPR can now track the volume of crude oil produced and other related activities through the Crude Oil and LNG Tracking (COLT). A situation described by industry observers as big relief to stakeholders.
With this application, the exact figure of crude produced can at various fields be tracked.
Watching the demonstration of the application at DPR headquarters in Lagos on Monday,Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu, minister of state for petroleum resources, said the computer based applications enable the agency to track the volume of crude oil produced from various terminals and all those vessels that carry the crude and where they were going to deliver them.
He said with this development the actual volume of crude produced could be made available at any given time.
“We are able to also track the vessel that came for export and see if they actual delivered the crude to those countries they claimed they are going to deliver them,” he said.
Through such innovation by the DPR it was able to recover all the outstanding royalties, which amounted to about N1.5 trillion, and also realised about $1.5 billion from licence renewal.
Nigeria has for a long time been bedevilled by lack of accuracy on the actual volume of crude it produces every day. The public has often been confronted with different figures as what is generated by the DPR, which is most time different from what is being generated by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and the oil companies operating in the country.
The same applications apply to the downstream, as the government agency would soon be able to properly monitor the amount of volume of refined products brought to the country and where the product is coming from.
The minister said the country had holistic database applications that enable the DPR efficiently perform it duties.
“We also launch the benchmarking system to track expenses in oil and gas industry, and we can continue in our process to try and pull down the unit cost of crude oil which has been a major challenge to the country.
“Given the oscillating price of oil all over the world, unless we are able to do this, if you produce all the oil in this world you will not be able to make money out of it.”
This is very helpful to the country and the oil companies are being challenged to march the very best practices internally, and collectively march the best practices externally in terms of oil prices, he said.
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