The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL), on Tuesday, lamented that vandals had carried out nefarious operations on over 5,000 kilometers of oil pipelines across the country, describing it as a national calamity.
The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the company, Mele Kyari, who made the lamentation during an interactive session with the Senate Committee on Petroleum (Downstream), however, assured Nigerians that the four oil refineries in the country would be made functional very soon.
He said that the problem of oil pipeline vandalism had been bedeviling the sector over the decades as the company had not been able to pump oil through the pipeline from Warri to Benin within the last 22 years.
“Over 5,000 kilometers of oil pipelines in the country are not working, As a result of pipeline vandalism, 10 million litres of oil was lost from volume pumped from Aba to Enugu at a time.
“The company has been unable to pump oil from Warri to Benin within the last 22 years and cannot connect to Ore.
“There is no amount of security measures that had not been taken to curb the crime without success, which to us in NNPCL, is substantially a national calamity,” he said.
Kyari however, said that as a way out, the company was embarking on massive replacement of the pipelines which aside from being vandalized, were old and obsolete.
He explained further to the Committee that deregulation of the oil sector and in particular subsidy removal carried out in May this year, had turned NNPCL into a profitable company.
He pointed out that before the deregulation in 2018, the company made a loss of N802 billion but after the deregulation in 2021, made an excess profit of N687 billion.
According to him, while 67 million litres of oil were consumed per day during the era of the subsidy regime, an average of 55 million litres is being consumed on a daily basis now, saying that the problem of smuggling the product across the border was a thing of the past.
The Chairman of the Committee, Senator Ifeanyi Ubah (APC, Anambra South), and all the members responded separately to submissions made by the NNPCL boss, that proper dissection of challenges facing the sector would be better made in a retreat.
However, Senator Seriake Dickson (PDP Bayelsa West), told the NNPCL boss to look critically into the surveillance security contract the company was operating as regards the non-inclusion of some oil-producing areas.
“Some local governments in Bayelsa State like Sagbama where I come from, are not covered by the contract with attendant consequences,” he said.