By Fatima Saka
An Oil and Gas Expert, Charlse Majomi, has called for a concerted drive and clearer fiscal terms to incentivise investments for increased upstream production of crude oil.
Majomi made the call in an interview with journalist, in Abuja on Sunday.
According to him, he said the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) needed to be clearer for increased production and competitiveness in the sector, in reacting to the inability of Nigeria to meet the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) quota.
Nigeria’s OPEC quota is pegged at 1.8 million barrels per day (bpd) but in the last few years, the country has struggled between 1.3 and 1.4 million borderline personality disorder, (bpd).
The OPEC’s Monthly Oil Market Report (MOMR) for March, 2022 also stated that Nigeria’s crude oil production declined to an average of 1.417 million bpd in February.
He said in order to increase oil production values; there should be security on the onshore asset while the cost of extracting the crude from the ground should be optimise, and government needed to ensure against infrastructure vandalism and increase security to mitigate crude oil theft.
“Though Nigeria has some of the highest production cost of crude oil, we have to optimise the production processes to decrease cost and break the cartel responsible for Illegal bunkering and diversion of crude oil.
“Oil production has been constrained by lack of investment in the upstream sector; we need that to replenish the output, also lot of crude oil is being diverted through illegal means even though our production is significantly higher than what we are presenting as production values to OPEC, also the issue of illegal crude oil diversion is quite a disturbing issue,“ he said.
In addition, he emphasised the need to hasten the rehabilitation of the refineries, adding that as long as the refining capabilities were constrained, enough products would not be refined.