BABAJIDE OKEOWO
Nigeria has revealed plans to increase its oil production output to 4 million barrels a day by 2025 and increase refining capacity to 1.5 million barrels daily. This is according to Maikanti Baru, Managing Director of the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC.
According to Baru, “Nigeria needs to unlock new barrels as quickly as possible,” he said. This is not the first time that Nigeria will be setting this target. Africa’s biggest oil producer previously set a 4 million-barrel-a-day production target for 2010, and successively delayed it over the years. The country, where output peaked near 2.5 million barrels a day in the middle of the last decade, has grappled with militant attacks, leakages, and theft at its oil infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Cheta Nwanze, an analyst at Lagos-based SBM Intelligence said setting a target is not new to NNPC but meeting the target has always been the main issue.
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“Targets such as these are not new to NNPC, Nigeria has not met a single production target for at least a decade now, in many cases because of security concern,” he said
Baru said part of the additional refining would come from a 650,000 barrel-a-day complex being built near Lagos by Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest person. NNPC is working with private investors for the remainder, Baru said.
“The desperate need for an improvement in local refining capacity has been obvious for decades,” Nwanze said. The 2025 plan is “extremely optimistic.”
NNPC, which pumps crude from the country’s fields in partnership with international companies like Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Exxon Mobil Corp., returned to profit in 2018 after reporting losses in at least the three previous years, according to statements on its website. That was mainly due to the strong performance of its oil and gas production unit. Its refineries had a $365 million operating loss.
