Highlights of Town Hall on Protecting Oil and Gas Infrastructure

06 Jul Highlights of Town Hall on Protecting Oil and Gas Infrastructure

The meeting, organised by the Ministry of Information and Culture in Abuja yesterday focused on Protecting Oil and Gas Infrastructure in the country.

* Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, said the government spends N60bn annually to repair vandalized pipelines. He said statistics have shown that between January 2019 and September 2020, 1,161 pipeline points were vandalized across the nation.

* Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, Godswill Akpabio, said the destruction of pipelines in the Niger Delta had made a lot of oil investors leave to region to other countries for their oil business investments.

Akpabio said perpetrators should be punished and tried openly to serve as a deterrent to others.

* The Minister of Environment, Mohammed Mahmood Abubakar, said Nigeria lost 43 percent of its revenues to oil theft, calling for prosecution of all pipeline vandals. “Apart from the impact on the nation’s earnings, consider also the environmental problems caused by the incessant vandalism, in terms of freshwater pollution, air pollution, soil pollution, etc., and you will appreciate the enormity of the problem.”

*The Minister of State for Petroleum, Mr Timipreye Sylva, said that attacks on oil and gas facilities across the country had reduced significantly since 2014. Represented by the Group Managing Director, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, Mele Kyari, he noted that from January to May 2021, the NNPC pipeline segments had suffered 203 breaks with system 2B having 80 pipeline breaks and system 2E, 114 breaks. He said all these had all led to a total cumulative loss of 39 million liters which amounted to N5.973bn.

He identified the main reasons why increasing production remained challenging.

“First is under-investment, you may genuinely not be able to put your money into it and secondly, you may have the money and not be able to due to activities of vandals, which can actually stop you from increasing your production.

“This is a challenge in our environment. However, I can confirm to you that it is not all bad news, because from 2015 to today, we have a calmer Niger Delta.

“We have far less issues on vandals action on our facilities than our access; that means the impact of attacks on our facilities has significantly reduced,” he said.

Sylva stressed that this did not happen suddenly, but were the outcomes of a number of engagements both at national and sub-national levels, including with members of the Armed Forces.