Nigeria Lost $41BN To Oil Theft From 2009 Till 2018 — NEITI

Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, NEITI, has said that crude oil and refined petroleum products valued at $41.9 billion were stolen from Nigeria in one decade, from 2009 to 2018.

In a recent statement released in Abuja titled “Stemming the Increasing Cost of Oil Theft to Nigeria,” NEITI said Nigeria lost $38.5 billion on just crude theft, $1.56 billion on domestic crude and another $1.8 billion on refined petroleum products between 2009 and 2018.

NEITI then urged the government to boost efforts to tackle oil theft, since the income from stolen crude would have assisted in the reduction of budget deficits and external borrowing.

It read, “While figures from government put the loss at between 150,000 to 250,000 barrels per day, BPD, data from private studies estimate the figure to be between 200,000 to 400,000 bpd. This implies that Nigeria may be losing up to a fifth of its daily crude oil production to oil thieves and pipeline vandals.

“In terms of volume, 138.000 barrels of crude oil was lost every day for the past 10 years, representing seven per cent of average production of two million bpd. Nigeria lost more than 505 million barrels of crude oil and 4.2 billion litres of petroleum products between 2009 and 2018.

“What is stolen, spilled or shut-in represents lost revenue, which ultimately translates to services that government cannot provide for citizens already in dire need of critical public goods.

“Stemming this hemorrhage and leakages should be an urgent priority for Nigeria at a time of dwindling revenues and increasing needs.”

“Curiously, the volume of losses does not particularly reflect the rate of pipeline breaks for the corresponding years, suggesting either that the criminals are becoming more efficient, or crude theft is occurring increasingly elsewhere. This may require further probing”

“This task team should include the oil companies and technical expertise in relevant fields. Command and control responsibility should be manned by professional intelligence personnel. The key mode of operation should be based on seamless communication to improve response time. The command and control should have direct real time access to information produced by the leak detection and localisation systems installed and operated by the oil companies.”