- Safiu Kehinde
Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Heineken Lokpobiri, has pointed out the deteriorating state of Oil pipeline as one of the reasons for the country’s low crude oil production.
He made this disclosure in his address at the 2024 PENGASSAN Energy and Labour Summit (PEALS 2024) held in Abuja earlier today.
Speaking on how to increase crude oil production, Lokpobiri expressed concern on oil theft and pipeline vandalism.
“We have identified that even when we have the capacity to produce, vandalization is the problem. The reason why the pipeline vandalization is very easy to do is that because the pipelines have all expired.
“They are completely corroded and as such anybody can just tap it and it will get busted.
“But there are better technologies which are more expensive. There are better pipelines that other people are using in other countries but they are not cheap.
“As a government what we are trying to do as I said earlier is to see how we can utilize every accessible field every single whale whether this well belongs to NPC or shell or any of the IOC.
“The only way we can increase production is running one thousand wells and each of them produce one thousand each that is another one million.” He said.
Lokpobiri, however, lauded the effort of Tinubu administration in increasing oil production from one million barrels per day to 1.7 million barrels per day.
Admitting to the global campaign against fossil fuel abandoned, Lokpobiri urged oil industry stakeholders to work in hand with the government in extracting the crude oil as early as they they can.