NNPC’s estimated crude oil theft loss is 700,000 bpd -Wunti

The real loss from crude oil theft in Nigeria, according to Bala Wunti, Chief Upstream Investment Officer of the NNPC Upstream Investment Management Services (NUIMS), is 700,000 barrels per day.

This information was revealed by Wunti earlier today during an interview with the Morning Show on Arise TV. According to him, the NNPC calculated the 700,000 barrels per day loss to be 21 million barrels per month. Wunti went on to describe the three different sorts of losses in more detail.

Engineering losses are a natural part of the engineering process but are never taken into account
Actual losses incurred as a result of the theft of hydrocarbons

Operators experience opportunity losses when they are unable to achieve what was first anticipated.
He admitted that there are many estimates of Nigeria’s losses due to crude oil theft before outlining how the NNPC arrived at their estimate.

He claims that the production of 1.88 million barrels of crude oil per day serves as the foundation of Nigeria’s budget. Nigeria’s stated production output for the month of August was 1 million barrels. Therefore, the difference is the 700,000 barrels per day that the nation is losing.

READ MORE: Crude oil theft: Nigeria set to lose $23 billion in 2023 – NSA

Keep in mind that opportunity losses may be the cause of the variations in oil losses. For this reason, speculative statistics are used to represent the losses resulting from crude oil theft. Wunti discussed how the Niger Delta’s security flaws have affected the production of crude oil. He stated:

“As I speak to you, Brass and Bonny are on force majeure, that is about 300,000 barrels deferred already. We have been working hard with the private security contractor to return the Trans-Niger pipeline. Hopefully, we will open Bonny very soon. One of our major trunklines – the Nembe Creek trunkline cannot be used because of security vulnerabilities, although Trans Forcados, Escravos, and Trans-Remo are back. Now, the previous security architecture was not working, so, we carried out a robust diagnosis, which revealed major issues to be addressed.”

Wunti claims that Nigeria’s challenging geological terrain is the problem. End-to-end visibility is therefore unattainable, especially in the marine economic zone. He continued by saying that the blue water’s appearance had nothing to do with the brown water or the backwater.

As a result, desegregated visibility is diverse. Wunti also discussed the lack of cooperation among the sector’s participants, including the regulators, security services, local governments, and private security companies.

He asserted that the new security architecture, which unites the security and intelligence agencies, the regulators, and the community, is based on a rectangular design and depends on command-and-control center technology.

“Today, we have end-to-end visibility. We can detect, deter and respond. We are still making a lot of improvements in our response. In responding, we detect, deactivate, destroy and remove, which is a complex process.
Sometimes, we have to destroy a whole vessel. Removing these vessels is a big job. And we are recording significant success because of the improved security situation. We are now almost an average of 350,000 to 400,000 barrels increase.”

RNN published that Nigerian oil production as of December 6 was 1.59 million barrels per day, according to information provided previously by Bala Wunti. In Uyo, Akwa-Ibom state, during the ongoing 11th Practical Nigerian Content event, he made this statement on Tuesday, December 6.