Crude oil production by the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company (NPDC), the flagship subsidiary of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), has increased by 57,000 barrels per day.
The NNPC, in its January 2019 news edition obtained in Abuja on Monday, said crude production by the NPDC increased from 108,000bpd in 2016 to 165,000bpd in 2017.
The 57,000bpd increase represents 52.7 per cent growth in crude production by the oil company.
The corporation’s Group Managing Director, Maikanti Baru, who disclosed this to employees of the oil firm in Abuja, stated that with the development, the NNPC was well on its way to meeting the 500,000bpd target by 2020.
He said the NPDC had been a key contributor to the consistent year-to-year national crude oil production growth, which had seen a steady rise from an average of 1.2 million barrels of oil per day in 2016 to 1.86mbpd in 2017 and 2.06mbpd in 2018.
Baru was quoted in the report as saying, “It is also worthy to note that NPDC’s equity production share closed at over 200,700bpd, representing about 10 per cent of the national daily production.
“Its (NPDC) last average weekly production of 332,000bpd makes the target of 500,000bpd for 2020 achievable.”
The NNPC boss also noted that with the NPDC’s supply of over 700 million standard cubic feet of gas per day to the Escravos-Lagos Pipeline System, the company had become the largest gas supplier to the domestic market.
Baru said the NPDC’s achievements were due to the introduction of some initiatives such as the Asset Management Team structure, strategic financing and autonomy.
Others include the security architecture framework review of the company, which promoted cooperation with joint venture partners and enhanced the decision-making process.
“We will continue to pursue the growth plan to transform the NPDC to the premier upstream company in Nigeria and entire sub-Saharan Africa,” Baru said.
On January 14 this year, The PUNCH exclusively reported that the NPDC was interfacing with third-party financiers to raise $3.15bn (N967.1bn at the official exchange rate of N307 to a dollar) to develop Nigeria’s crude reserves and increase oil and gas production from Oil Mining Lease 13.
The report revealed that the fund would enable the NPDC to develop 416 million barrels of oil reserves and increase production by 94,000 barrels of oil per day.
