Page 8 - AfrOil Week 35 2019

AfrOil PERFORMANCE AfrOil
NNPC head sees Nigerian oil output rising to 2.5mn bpd next year
e new head of Nigeria’s national oil com- pany (NOC) has expressed optimism about his country’s ability to increase oil production in the short term.
Mele Kyari, the group managing director of Nigerian National Petroleum Co. (NNPC), told Bloomberg in an interview last week that the country was capable of pushing oil output lev- els up to 2.5mn barrels per day (bpd) next year. Nigeria is currently extracting around 2.3mn bpd of liquids, including 350,000 bpd of gas condensate, but can easily bring shut-in pro- duction facilities back on stream, he claimed.
Kyari did not divulge many speci c details of Abuja’s plans, but he did say that NNPC had about 300,000 bpd of stranded supply. The company can resume commercial operations at these sites “without doing anything signi cant,” he claimed.
e managing director went on to say that he expected Nigerian oil output to continue ris- ing a er 2020. e country hopes to bring pro- duction levels up to 3mn bpd within the next four years and could see its reserves rise to 40bn
barrels during the same interval, he said. Commenting on the latter goal, he explained that NNPC was in a better position to invest in exploration because it had paid o $3.8bn of the $5.1bn settlement deal it had concluded with Chevron (US), Eni (Italy), ExxonMobil (US), Royal Dutch Shell (UK-Netherlands), Total (France) and other majors. e NOC intends to clear the remaining $1.3bn by June 30, 2020. Kyari acknowledged that NNPC might face certain obstacles along the way, including secu- rity threats and acts of the and sabotage car- ried out by separatist and militant groups. But he also asserted that Nigerian authorities were dealing with these problems and had already
succeeded in bringing the levels down.
He declined to answer a question from Bloomberg about the exact quantity of oil sto- len from Nigerian pipelines and storage facili- ties. However, the news agency quoted Godwin Obaseki, the chairman of NNPC, as saying that a government committee charged with mon- itoring the matter had estimated the gure at
120,000 bpd. ™
Fuel prices drop slightly in Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe’s government has slightly reduced its ceiling for motor fuel prices, mark- ing the rst weekly decline since January 13.
In a statement, the Zimbabwe Energy Reg- ulatory Authority (ZERA) published a weekly pricing schedule for gasoline and diesel, saying that the new rates would take e ect on Septem- ber 2. According to the document, fuel sell- ers can now charge no more than ZWD10.25 ($0.0283) per litre for gasoline and ZWD9.86 ($0.0272) per litre for diesel.
Under the previous schedule, which was issued on August 26, ZERA had capped the price of gasoline at ZWD10.32 ($0.0285) per litre and diesel at ZWD10.01 ($0.0277) per litre.
e government agency explained its deci- sion to bring the price ceiling down as a con- sequence of “FOB price movements and the revised duty regime (SI 161 of 2019) applicable from September 2.” is was not necessarily revealing, since ZERA has used nearly identical phrasing in multiple pricing decrees this year.
e price cut may bring some relief to Zim- babwean consumers, who have seen motor fuel prices rise substantially over the last two years. But it does go against the wishes of Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube, who has said he would
like motor fuel prices to be closer to $1 per litre. Zimbabwe’s government has subsidised gas- oline and diesel prices to keep them far below world market levels for many years. is policy helped exacerbate shortages in the country by giving local traders an incentive to smuggle fuel bound for Zimbabwe to neighbouring coun-
tries, where it can be sold for a higher price. ZERA recently took a tentative step towards correcting the situation by introducing di erent fuel pricing schedules for di erent regions of the country. It explained its decision by stating that it was trying to factor in the cost of truck- ing gasoline and diesel into di erent cities and geographical zones. Prices will now be highest
in the Victoria Falls region, it added.™
ZimLive.com
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Week 35 03•September•2019