The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC has disclosed that Nigeria’s crude oil output increased by 31.1 million barrels in four months.
OPEC’s recent report on the monthly oil market obtained on February 16, 2023 at Abuja covered the activities of the industry for October 2022, November 2022, December 2022 and January 2023.
Investors King gathered that in the third quarter of 2022, Nigeria’s average oil output was 0.999 million barrels per day.
OPEC data showed that Nigeria had a daily increase in its output in January 2023, as it raked an average of 1.258 million barrels per day. With this, it added 259,000 barrels daily and 7.77 million barrels in the month.
The breakdown of statistics for the fourth quarter of 2022 stated that an average of 1.186 million barrels per day was recorded in November and 1.235 million barrels daily in December.
“The OPEC Reference Basket crude rose $1.94, or 2.4 per cent, m-o-m (month-on-month) in January to average $81.62/barrel. The ICE Brent front-month increased by $2.57, or 3.2 per cent, to average $83.91/barrel, and NYMEX WTI rose by $1.64, or 2.1 per cent, to average $78.16/barrel. The Brent/WTI futures spread widened m-o-m, rising by 93 cents to average $5.75/barrel,” the data stated.
Stakeholders of the sector have applauded the federal government for the impressive record, urging it to sustain the oil output increase as Nigeria is yet to meet up the OPEC’s oil output quota stipulated for its members.
Nigeria’s remarkable additional 31.1 million barrels of crude oil in four months was made possible due to the beefed up security and surveillance of oil facilities in the Niger Delta region of the country where crude oil is majorly derived from, thereby reducing oil theft and increasing its output, Investors King learnt.
The President, Petroleum Retail Outlet Owners Association of Nigeria, Billy Gillis-Harry commended the security agencies for improving security in the Niger Delta region which resulted to the impressive record.
“We’ve been following developments as regards oil production and we must commend the government and security agencies for the work they are doing on this.
“However, there’s still a lot of work to do, because we have not met the production quota approved for us as a country by OPEC. So we have to work harder to meet this target in order to get the revenue from that too,” he said.