Posted on 03/17/2015 6:26:33 PM PDT by thackney
Consistently low oil prices will hamper Nigeria's bid to boost output to 4 million barrels per day (bpd), Oil Minister Diezani Alison-Madueke was quoted as saying on Tuesday at an oil and gas conference in the capital Abuja.
"Flexibility in capex and funding in general will be further constrained in the year 2015," the minister said in a speech read out by Joseph Dawha, group managing director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp.
Africa's biggest oil producer has been hit hard by global oil prices that have around halved since June, because it accounts for up to 80 percent of government revenues and about 95 percent of foreign reserves.
"Consistently depressed oil prices will limit the industry's scope to manoeuvre ... and reaching the target of 4 million bpd," the minister said. "The industry must challenge itself to raise funding in order to meet these targets."
Nigeria has been targeting this level for some time but has struggled to even regain its peak production of 2.44 million bpd in 2005, when militant movements attacked infrastructure in the oil producing delta region until the 2009 amnesty.
Output growth has since been stunted by legislative uncertainties and rampant pipeline vandalism and oil theft. Average crude output was just under 2 million bpd in 2014, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
A draft of the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) drawn up to overhaul the industry has been sitting with parliament since 2008. Nigeria's lower house completed a report on the bill for the first time last week but passing the law is still many stages away.
(Excerpt) Read more at rigzone.com ...
An intelligent person would see “low prices” as nature’s way of telling you it’s not a good time to “boost output.”
Perhaps that’s not what we’re dealing with here.
The muzzies will agitate over our imperialism for this...
Yawn...
A government that lost a massive amount of revenue is desperate to get some of that back.
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