The Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited and its joint venture partners plan to add about 192,000 barrels of crude oil per day to Nigeria’s oil production between the third quarter of this year and the first quarter of 2024.
NNPCL announced this on Wednesday at the ongoing Nigeria Oil and Gas international conference in Abuja. It stated that the crude oil volumes would be produced from various Oil Mining Licences.
The Executive Vice President, Upstream, NNPCL, Adokiye Tombomieye, who was represented by an official of the company, Igandan Olanrewaju, said the oil firm had resumed crude oil production activities on many OMLs, adding that the wells would deliver and increase Nigeria’s oil earnings soon.
He said, “We have resumed crude oil production in earlier challenged areas like OML 29, OML 18, and OML 24, and we expect to ramp up to about 80,000 barrels around that axis with our JV partners in Q3 2023.
“First oil to tanks of about 25,000 barrels was achieved in NEPL, which is former NPDC, in Itakpe field and we expect to fully monetise that by the end of Q3, 2023. For Obodo field in OML 1, it is expected to bring about 20,000 barrels in late Q4, 2023.”
He noted that oil field development in OMLs 71 and 72 was expected to add about 20,000 to 30,000 barrels to national production possibly by late Q3, 2023.
According to him, “We have another field in First E&P OML 85, which will add about 20,000 barrels by Q1 2024. Within the deep-water space, we are concluding the Apo turnaround maintenance and that will bring about 10,000 barrels.
“Additionally, within OML 130, we hooking up two injector wells and we expect that that will bring another 10,000 barrels by Q3 2023. The Bonga wells, we expect to deliver additional 7,000 barrels from that,” the NNPCL EVP stated.
Tombomieye, however, pointed out that “Realising the full potential of these projects requires a conducive investment climate, and this is where the new NNPC structure comes into play.”
He called for the enhancement of security, stressing that the “issue is a significant barrier to the realisation of our vision for the upstream sector.”
He added, “In August 2022, with the insecurity surrounding our critical pipeline infrastructure, it was so severe that we dropped to less than one million barrels of crude only.
“So to address this issue, NNPC in conjunction with stakeholders, we had to devise a new security architecture for the entire industry.
“And with that, we have seen an upward trend in our production so much that in February, we went to as high as 1.69 million barrels of crude oil and condensate.”
