… as crude oil production drops by 27.23%
The Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) on Wednesday commended the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) for taking the initiative to provide up-to-date information to Nigerians on the state of the country’s petroleum sector through its monthly financial and operations reports, which the national oil company has been publishing since August 2015.
However, NEITI has also called on NNPC to open up more especially by living up to its self-declared commitments to openness, transparency and accountability.
Both the commendation and the charge were contained in the maiden issue of the NEITI Occasional Paper Series, jointly published by NEITI and BudgIT, one of Nigeria’s leading technology-driven, civic-advocacy group on budget and public finance issues.
Titled ‘Review of NNPC’s Monthly Financial and Operations Reports’, the joint publication analyses data publicly disclosed by NNPC covering a 21-month period between January 2015 and September 2016.
It however stated that data in the NNPC monthly reports are yet to be independently validated or reconciled by NEITI.
“What NNPC has done with its monthly reports could be termed a sea-change, From being the poster-boy for opacity, NNPC is voluntarily embracing openness and providing near real-time information about the state of play of our oil and gas sector today,” said Waziri Adio, the executive secretary of NEITI”.
Crude oil production dropped by 27.23 percent between January 2015 and September 2016, the fluctuated trend showing that the highest production per month was recorded in October 2015 (69.49 million barrels) and the lowest recorded in August 2016 (46.56 million barrels).
When the production figures for January 2015 (68.07 million barrels) and September 2016 (49.53 million barrels) are compared, there was a decline in monthly production by 27.23 percent.
The same trend was noticeable in terms of average daily production per quarter, as 2.16 million barrels were produced daily on the average in the first quarter of 2015 as against the 1.60 million barrels average daily production per quarter in the third quarter of 2016.
The fall in oil production was largely attributed to growing vandalism and militancy in the Niger Delta region, though production fluctuation was noticeable even before the onset of militant activities.
The fall in daily production is likely to negatively impact the implementation of the current budget, given that the budget was predicated on a daily production of 2.2 million barrels.
