From TV360Nigeria
The Nigerian National Petroleum Cooperation has warned that the Nation’s oil and gas reserves are already depleting.
Nigeria was Africa’s largest economy and its top oil producer, but its public finances have suffered as the price of crude oil dropped around the world.
The economic crisis has also worsened due to attacks on the country’s pipelines by militants in the Niger Delta region.
The attack by militants had driven oil production to around 700,000 bpd, below its 2016 budget assumption of 2.2 million barrels per day.
A statement from the office of the Group Managing Director of the NNPC, Maikanti Baru said that the country needed to increase its gas reserve base to improve oil production.
The statement said that less than three per cent of all oil wells drilled in the Niger Delta Basin, both onshore and swamp, were deeper than 15,000 feet, adding that a greater number of these wells had not gone beyond the 10,000 feet as a high pressure regime seemed to be a limiting factor.
Baru also noted that the country’s aspirations were to increase oil production to four million barrels per day and meet gas demand of 15 billion standard cubic feet per day, bscfd, by 2020, required for industrialization and consumption.
He also expressed the readiness of the NNPC to partner with stakeholders in the oil and gas industry to grow the nation’s fast depleting reserves in order to increase productivity in the petroleum sector.
Official Data from the country’s bureau of statistic showed that its gross domestic product (GDP) contracted by 2.06 percent in the second quarter, sending Africa’s biggest economy into a recession after a decline in the first quarter.
The country was last in a recession, for less than a year, in 1991, and experienced a prolonged one that started in 1982 and last until 1984.
