Power outages in Nigeria are likely
to persist until May as oil and gas giant Shell struggles to repair a major
facility damaged by militants.
Nigeria’s Vice President Yemi
Osinbajo visited the Forcados Export Terminal in the southern Delta state over
the weekend. The facility, which is run by a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell,
known as the Shell Petroleum Development Corporation, was subject to an attack
in February when an underwater pipeline was hit by an explosion.
Inflows into the terminal and exports
out were halted after the attack, taking one of the country’s energy hubs
offline. Forcados has the capacity to export around 400,000 barrels per day,
the Financial
Times reported.
In a statement
released on Sunday , Osinbajo said that the damage to Forcados
affected around 40 percent of the West African country’s gas supply and was
responsible for ongoing
power shortages in Nigeria. Osinbajo urged Shell to do
“whatever else can be done and do it as expeditiously as possible,” but the
company’s current repair plan envisages that the facility will not be fully
repaired until May at the earliest.
Attacks on oil and gas facilities in
Nigeria have been increasing in recent months.Two of the
four refineries owned by the state-run Nigerian National
Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) were temporarily closed in January due to supply
problems caused by the attacks, which Nigerian power minister Babatunde Fashola
said were costing the country $2.4 million
per day at the time. One of the refineries has since reopened but attacks have
continued, with three people
killed in an explosion at a facility owned by Italian
company ENI in March.
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari
recently vowed to deal with the “vandals and saboteurs” responsible for hitting
oil pipelines “the way we
dealt with Boko Haram,” a reference to the Nigerian military’s sustained
offensive against the jihadi group.
Osinbajo reiterated the government’s
intention to deal with the problem, saying that Buhari’s administration was
considering the establishment of a “permanent pipeline security force” that
would be “armed with sophisticated weapons to ensure we contain the vandalism
and overhaul security.”
The Niger Delta was the site of a sustained
militant campaign in the mid-2000s, when groups such as the Movement for the
Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) kidnapped workers at oil facilities and
destroyed pipelines in protest at what they saw as the unfair distribution of
resources. At its peak, the militancy cut Nigeria’s oil production to 800,000
barrels per day—less than a third of the maximum 2.5 million barrels per day.
The recent spate of attacks came in
the wake of Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency issuing an arrest
warrant for ex-MEND leader Government Ekpemupolo—known as Tompolo—in
January on charges of theft and money laundering totaling more than 35 billion
naira ($176 million), which he denies. Tompolo has also denied any links to the
recent attacks but has yet to hand
himself in to the Nigerian authorities.
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