Crude oil thieves using technologies to lay pipes – Kyari

 

Group Chief Executive Officer Nigerian National Petroleum Company Ltd (NNPCL) Mallam Mele Kyari has said oil theft was on the rise owing to collaboration between the  perpetrators and some elements within the security agencies on the one hand, and top government officials on the other.

He also blamed the alarming oil theft on the level of technology employed by the oil thieves. 

Speaking at a programme on Channels TV monitored by Blueprint in Abuja, Kyari, who described the level of connivance in the system as  alarming, said the company was yet to come to terms with the rising oil theft.

He said: “When you introduce technology into stealing and this is precisely what they did and when there is a collaboration of people who should not be part of that transactions, you can lay pipelines and no one will see it.

“You can do it in the night if you have the abilities and ultimately, this is what we think happened. You can lay pipelines for the wrong reasons to abandon or active assets. You will see end-to-end collaboration either by people who are around those assets, people operating the assets or people supposed to provide security.

“You can eliminate anything. When you find collaborators in the system, then you can’t  get anything done. We didn’t know because the extent of collaboration is unknown to us.”

The NNPCL helmsman said the current efforts of government at tackling the scourge was already yielding results. 

Nigeria is said to lose about 600,000 barrels of crude oil per day to the activities of sophisticated oil thieves and pipeline vandals. 

According to data from the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Nigeria’s oil production for September dropped to an all time low of 983,000 as against the OPEC+ production quota of 1.8 million barrels per day.

 But Kyari said there is now a full surveillance of Nigeria’s oil infrastructure.  

“The federal government has deployed helicopters for 24-hour surveillance to monitor and protect pipelines,” he said. 

Oil theft has become a malignant cancer in Nigeria for years with unimaginable volumes of oil being lifted by some cabals in the oil sector.

Recently, the NNPCL said it uncovered an illegal oil connection from Forcados Terminal that operated for nine years with about 600,000 barrels per day of oil lost in the same period.

Similarly, a former militant leader, Government Ekpemepulo, popularly known as Tompolo, said about 58 illegal oil points were discovered so far since the operation to end oil theft on the waterways of Delta and Bayelsa states began.