OpeOluwani Akintayo
Lagos – Nigeria’s crude oil production would likely reach two million barrels per day, mb/d, by the end of this year, according to Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Sylva.
The minister stated this at the Gastech 2021 conference in Dubai as he disclosed that the country has already written the Oganization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its partners, known as OPEC+, to increase Nigeria’s officially allocated production quota to reflect its rising output.
The current quota allowed the country by OPEC+, covering crude oil and condensate, is 1.61 million barrels per day for September and is scheduled to rise by roughly 17,000 barrels per day in subsequent months.
However, SweetcrudeReports found that Nigeria’s production has been around 1.3mb/d for the past several months.
Sylva said output could rebound to around 1.7 million barrels per day by November and two million barrels per day by the end of the year.
According to him, the country had already written the OPEC+ group for an increment in its quota in this regard.
He said: “We’ve put request on the table, and we expect that to be looked at.
“We have capacity for more production than we are producing right now. Unfortunately, we are constrained by the quota.”
The minister said Nigeria’s full production capacity of about 2.2 million barrels per day should be reflected in a revised quota, noting that the country’s production struggles is due to technical problems from re-tapping reservoirs that had been shut to comply with the stringent OPEC+ cuts of the past 17 months.
He said the production struggles would soon be fixed. “We had some issues from shutting down the reservoirs,” he was quoted as saying by S&P Global Platts.
“When you shut down a reservoir, to restart it, sometimes there are challenges,” he added.
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