Mele Kyari, group chief executive officer, Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited, has said that the country will produce 2.2 million barrels of crude oil per day in 2023.
Kyari made this known at the 13th Global UAE Energy Forum themed, “Year ahead energy outlook 2023” which he attended virtually.
“Definitely, we can hit our target of 2.2 million barrels per day, but our budget target is 1.8 million bpd.
“There are construction works that we are doing on our pipelines that will aid our oil production,” said Mele Kyari.
According to him, the country has a number of projects that will come on board in 2023.
On the other hand, the GCEO said that there have been challenges with security and underinvestment in the last ten years.
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“We have a security challenge that manifested in early 2022,” he said. “In July, our net crude oil excluding condensate came down to about a million barrels, the lowest ever in history. However, that has been restored because we took some practical steps.”
He said in the case of Nigeria, there are different challenges than just a lack of investment in the last 45 years, where cash flows do not support the investment.
On underinvestment, Kyari said that the energy transition has been the major reason for below-par investment in the sector in the last decade.
“And of course, this was further complicated by the COVID-19 period when investment was very low and there was no basis for people to put their money into this business,” said Kyari.
He, however, said that efforts are ongoing to bring back money into the capital structure despite all the restrictions seen around the financial sector.
“When we get back our refineries with a combined capacity of 450,000 to 455,000 bpd and the Dangote refinery that will come up by the mid of this year, our national capacity will be somewhere around 1.1 million bpd,” said Kyari.
