The Nigeria Extractive Industries Initiative ( NEITI) has said that a total of Crude oil and refined products worth $41.9bn have been stolen from Nigeria in the last 10 years.
NEITI urged the government to embrace a new technology known as oil fingerprinting technology, comprehensive metering infrastructure of all facilities and other creative strategies to help reduce the rate at which Nigerian crude oil and petroleum is being stolen.
This was brought to light in a policy brief released in Abuja on Wednesday.
A breakdown by NEITI revealed that the nation lost $38.5bn on crude theft alone, $1.56bn on domestic crude and another $1.8bn on refined petroleum products between 2009 and 2018.
NEITI expressed their concerns that in the face of current dwindling revenues, paying priority attention to curb oil theft in the country’s oil and gas industry had become both necessary and urgent to expand revenue generation.
According to the report Nigeria reportedly lost an average of $11m daily, which translated to $349m in a month and about $4.2bn annually to crude and product losses arising from stealing, process lapses and pipeline vandalism.
The report read that “While figures from government put the loss at between 150,000 and 250,000 barrels per day, data from private studies estimated the figure to be between 200,000 and 400,000bpd.
“This implies that Nigeria may be losing up to a fifth of its daily crude oil production to oil thieves and pipeline vandals.”
NEITI appealed to the government to reduce the high level of oil theft by reducing budget deficits and external borrowing.
“Stemming this haemorrhage and leakages should be an urgent priority for Nigeria at a time of dwindling revenues and increasing needs,”
“In terms of volume, 138.000 barrels of crude oil was lost every day for the past 10 years, representing seven per cent of average production of two million bpd.
“Nigeria lost more than 505 million barrels of crude oil and 4.2 billion litres of petroleum products between 2009 and 2018.
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“What is stolen, spilled or shut-in represents lost revenue, which ultimately translates to services that government cannot provide for citizens already in dire need of critical public goods.”