Source: THISDAY LIVE
Ejiofor Alike in Lagos and Chineme Okafor in Abuja with agency reports
Nigeria’s crude oil production has
climbed to 1.6 million barrels per day (mbpd), following repairs on some
of the oil and gas installations damaged by militant groups in the
Niger Delta, the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr. Ibe
Kachikwu, disclosed yesterday.
According to reports from Reuters and Bloomberg, Kachikwu
said in Vienna, Austria, where oil ministers of the Organisation of
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) unanimously appointed the former
Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation
(NNPC), Dr. Mohammed Barkindo, as the cartel’s Secretary-General, that
the country’s production had rebounded to this level after it fell to
about 1.4mbpd in May due to a string of militant attacks and an accident
on the ExxonMobil Qua Iboe export platform.
He also said despite continued attacks
by militants in the restive Niger Delta, Nigeria was still on target to
produce 2.3mbpd in 2016.
His disclosure also followed reports
that OPEC, which appointed Barkindo, has again failed to agree on
production cuts or freeze to shore up crude oil prices in the
international market as disagreements between two Middle East rivals,
Saudi Arabia and Iran, resurfaced.
Barkindo by his appointment becomes
the second Nigerian, after former Minister of Petroleum Resources,
Rilwanu Lukman, to serve as the oil cartel’s secretary-general.
Kachikwu, in a tweet from his tweeter handle, confirmed Barkindo’s appointment. He also congratulated him on the feat.
“Congratulations to Dr. Barkindo Sanusi Barkindo on your appointment as OPEC Secretary General,” Kachikwu tweeted.
Kachikwu was credited with playing a
huge role in Barkindo’s emergence as the cartel’s secretary-general, as
the minister was said to have worked hard behind the scenes at
convincing OPEC’s influential members to allow a Nigerian to oversee the
administration of OPEC’s headquarters in Vienna.
Similarly, Indonesia’s Energy Minister Sudirman Said disclosed in Vienna that Barkindo’s appointment was by consensus.
Barkindo will succeed outgoing Abdalla
El-Badri who had been on the job for nine years. Barkindo was also the
acting head of OPEC in 2006.
Seventy-six-year-old Libyan El-Badri
was originally due to step down in 2012 after serving the maximum two
terms but members were unable to agree on a replacement and his tenure
was extended at successive meetings.
Barkindo beat rival nominees that
included Indonesia’s Mahendra Siregar. He attended Ahmadu Bello
University in Zaria. He is also the Wali of Adamawa.
He spent more than 23 years at NNPC
where he served in various capacities including Deputy Managing Director
of Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) and head of the international
trading unit. He also served for 15 years as Nigeria’s representative to
OPEC.
Meanwhile, OPEC yesterday failed to
agree on a crude oil output policy, even though Saudi Arabia promised
not to flood the oil market with extra oil, while Iran insisted on the
right to raise its production steeply.
Reuters reported that tensions
between the Sunni-led kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Shi’ite Islamic
Iran had been the highlights of several previous OPEC meetings,
including in December 2015 when the group failed to agree on a formal
output target for the first time in years.
Tensions, however, were doused
yesterday as Saudi Arabia’s new Minister of Energy, Khalid al-Falih,
showed Riyadh wanted to be more conciliatory and his Iranian peer Bijan
Zanganeh kept his criticism of Riyadh to an unusual minimum.
Despite the setback, Saudi Arabia
moved to soothe market fears that failure to reach any deal would prompt
OPEC’s largest producer, already pumping near record highs, to raise
production further to punish rivals and gain additional market share.
“We will be very gentle in our
approach and make sure we don’t shock the market in any way,” Falih told
reporters after the meeting.
“There is no reason to expect that
Saudi Arabia is going to go on a flooding campaign,” Falih said when
asked whether Saudi Arabia could add more barrels to the market.
The market has grown increasingly used
to OPEC clashes over the past two years as political foes Riyadh and
Tehran fight proxy wars in Syria and Yemen.
Saudi Arabia effectively frustrated
the plans for a global production freeze – which was aimed at
stabilising oil markets – in April.
It said then that it would join the deal, which would also have involved non-OPEC Russia, only if Iran agreed to freeze output.
Tehran has been the main stumbling
block for OPEC to agree on output policy over the past year as the
country boosted supplies despite calls from other members for a
production freeze.
Tehran has argued that it should be
allowed to raise production to levels seen before the imposition of
now-ended Western sanctions over Iran’s nuclear programme.
Iranian oil minister said Tehran would
not support any new collective output ceiling and wanted the debate to
focus on individual country production quotas.
“Without country quotas, OPEC cannot control anything,” Zanganeh told reporters.
He insisted Tehran deserved a quota – based on historic output levels – of 14.5 per cent of OPEC’s overall production
OPEC is pumping 32.5mbpd, which would
give Iran a quota of 4.7mbpd – well above its current output of 3.8
million, according to Tehran’s estimates, and 3.5 million, based on
market estimates.
At its previous meeting in December 2015, OPEC effectively allowed its 13 members to pump at will.
As a result, prices crashed to $27 per
barrel in January, their lowest in over a decade, but have since
recovered to around $50 due to global supply outages.
Yesterday, Brent prices eased 1.5 per cent to $49 per barrel.
Zanganeh made a few conciliatory
remarks, saying he was happy with the meeting and received no signals
from other producers that they planned to increase output.
Until December 2015, OPEC
had a ceiling of 30mbpd – in place since December 2011, although it
effectively abandoned individual production quotas years ago.
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