OpeOluwani Akintayo
Lagos — The Federal Government has set up a committee to audit the activities of oil companies in the upstream petroleum industry in the last two years following recent oil theft allegations.
Gbenga Komolafe, Chief Executive, Nigeria Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission, NUPRC on Tuesday, said the experts will ascertain the actual volume of crude oil stolen by vandals.
According to him, action on the directive had commenced immediately and is ongoing.
The statement read in part, “The NUPRC has empaneled a team of experts to carry out thorough auditing of the activities of operators in the upstream petroleum industry in the last two years.
“This is to ascertain the actual volume of crude oil stolen by vandals and saboteurs against recent allegations by some industry operators regarding the volume of crude stolen on a daily basis from their operations.
“The panel is to carry out a forensic investigation to cover the technical and commercial operations of oil companies involved in drilling and selling of crude oil.”
The move comes following billionaire businessman, Tony Elumelu, statement that the reason Nigeria had been unable to meet its oil production quota was not because of low investment but theft.
Elumelu’s position opposed that of the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Chief Timipre Sylva, who blamed Nigeria’s inability to meet its oil production quota on low investments.
Elumelu had said, “How can we be losing over 95 per cent of oil production to thieves? Look at the Bonny Terminal that should be receiving over 200,000 barrels of crude oil daily, instead, it receives less than 3,000 barrels, leading the operator @Shell to declare force majeure.”
Although Nigeria’s oil production quota as approved by OPEC was pegged at about 1.8 million barrels per day, yet in the last few years the country has struggled between 1.3 and 1.4 million barrels per day.
Also, the former Chief Executive Officer of Seplat Energy Plc, Austin Avuru, stated last week that up to 80 percent of oil pumped in Nigeria, particularly in the East, was stolen.
Reacting, Komolafe, said that a panel had been set up to audit oil firms’ activities, describing oil theft as a plague on the industry.
He added, “The commission thus considers worrisome, the crude loss figures recently being quoted in the media by some operators, given actions taken so far on the issue.
“To ascertain the veracity of these claims, the commission has activated all the necessary mechanisms to get to the root of the matter and establish the actual volume of crude stolen as against the volumes claimed.”
Komolafe said the NUPRC had stepped up efforts to deal with the issue of oil theft in collaboration with the military and other relevant agencies.
“The commission has mandated the newly constituted panel to investigate the claims regarding the volume of theft from the various oils fields and establish the actual operational capacities of the operators; to find out if the volumes being touted are actual; and if so, what additional measures need to be put in place to effectively address the issue,” he stated.
The NUPRC boss said a stakeholders’ meeting had been called to discuss the matter with a view to jointly address the situation.
He further stated that the commission, at a meeting of its management on Monday, activated its technical and commercial mandate to demand for the statement of financial accounts of the operators and reservoir accounts of productive oil wells for the last two years.
“This will entail both sales audit and reservoir audit to establish correlations between their technical and commercial activities vis-a-vis the monitoring and evaluation records available to regulatory agencies.”
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