The chief executive officer, Nigeria LNG, Philip Mshelbila, has expressed worry over drop in the company’s gas production capacity, saying that theft and vandalism were gradually strangulating Nigeria’s oil and gas sector.
Mshelbila who was one of the panelists at the on-going 2022 Nigeria Oil and Gas conference in Abuja on Tuesday, said: “We have been producing in the last month at about between 60 to 68 percent utilisation. In other words, roughly 35% of our capacity is empty,”
“There are many factors, but the biggest one of them is crude oil theft. If we don’t address this, we will not get out of this quagmire that we’re in.”
Mshelbila said his company had stopped exports of liquefied petroleum gas for domestic use to meet demand from the local market.
Nigeria’s petroleum regulator, NUPRC, said last week that the country lost $1 billion in revenue during the first quarter of this year due to crude oil theft, warning the practise was a threat to the country’s economy and top Africa’s oil producer.
Nigeria LNG is a consortium between state-run NNPC Ltd, Eni, TotalEnergies and Shell with a capacity of 22 million tons per year.
