Nigeria Loses 200,000bpd Oil Production To Shell’s Asset Maintenance

Nigeria, which has seen an exponential oil production decline in the last few months, is shutting another 200 000 daily production as oil major Shell announces routine maintenance.

Shell’s 200,000 barrels-per-day Bonga deep water storage and offloading vessel, FPSO, in Nigeria is scheduled for maintenance in October, a spokesperson said on Sunday.

The Shell Nigeria Exploration and Production Company did not say how long maintenance on the Bonga floating unit would last.

Bonga is typically one of the larger export streams from Nigeria.

Bonga crude oil stream was due to load 31,000 bpd in October, down from 95,000 the previous month, according to a preliminary export programme seen by traders.

SNEPCo pioneered Nigeria’s deep-water oil and gas production at Bonga, a project that increased Nigeria’s oil capacity by 10 per cent when it began producing in 2005. Bonga is located 120km offshore and lies in water more than 1,000 metres deep across an area of 60 square kilometres. It has the capacity to produce more than 200,000 barrels of oil a day and 150 million standard cubic feet of gas a day.

Recall that the country’s crude oil production output nosedived to 972,394 barrels per day in August 2022 from 1,083,899 barrels per day produced in July, a report by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has indicated.

Globally, the upstream sector of the petroleum industry uses the rig count as a major index for measuring exploration and other activities.

Earlier this year, Nigeria’s rig count was six, which was very low and the rig count figure later progressed steadily to hit 11 four months later in April.

This figure was sustained till July when the industry started developing some setbacks and the number further dropped to 10.

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According to OPEC, Angola and Libya produced higher volumes during the same period and overtook Nigeria.

OPEC’s September 2022 report also showed that Angola became Africa’s highest crude oil producer for the month under review with an average production of 1.187 million barrels per day.

Libya followed closely with crude oil production averaging 1.123 million barrels per day for the same month.

This further confirmed another report recently released by the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) confirming Nigeria’s low performance during the month in review.

The drop has been noted to be the lowest data about Nigeria’s oil exploration in a long while.

On the reasons for the drop in rig count, the NURPC noted that the industry had faced a lack of investment from operators in the industry including the International Oil Companies, IoCs and their indigenous counterparts.