The number of functional crude oil production rigs in Nigeria decreased by 37.5% to just 10 operational rigs in March 2022, the OPEC said.
OPEC’s latest Monthly Oil Market Report for April 2022 showed that Nigeria’s operational oil rigs had been on the decline since 2019.
OPEC stated that in 2019 Nigeria had an average of 16 functional rigs, but this dropped to 11 in 2020 and crashed further to an average of seven in 2021.
Operators in Nigeria’s oil and gas sector had also attributed the drop in oil production to oil theft. Also an analysis of the OPEC report showed that Nigeria’s oil production had been falling since January. While the country produced 1.413 million barrels of crude oil daily in January, this dropped to 1.378 million barrels per day in February and plunged further to 1.354 million barrels per day in March.
Nigeria’s oil production quota by OPEC has revolved around 1.8 million barrels per day. The country has repeatedly missed this target due to oil theft. “And that clearly is the biggest form of business disruption that we are facing today,” the NNPC boss had stated.