The House of Representatives has lanented the recurring destruction of oil and gas pipelines in the country.
The Chairman, Special Committee on Oil Theft, Rep. Alhassan Ado-Doguwa, condemned the act at a meeting with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC Ltd. in Abuja.
The engagement was to unmask the root cause of oil theft in the country and the possible solution to the menace.
Ado-Doguwa said it had been established that operating oil and gas pipelines in Nigeria constituted a herculean challenge.
“It is saddening to note that these infractions do not stop with the pipelines; daily breaches are also recorded at the oil well heads, flow stations, loading, and export terminals, among others”, he said.
According to him, the opacity and non-transparency of regulatory activities at the nation’s crude oil export terminals were alarming.
“We are compiling the facts and figures. Instances where approvals are hastily granted to vessels involved in crude theft just to cover official complicity are reported.
“lncidences of undeclared liftings are noted, and all these and several other infractions, particularly in our offshore marine environment, contribute to the huge volume of crude oil theft being reported”, he added
Meanwhile, the Group Managing Director, NNPC Ltd., Mr Mele Kyari, said no fewer than 9000 infractions on its pipeline were recorded in one year.
He said between 2022 to date, the corporation had deactivated 6,465 illegal refineries, while 4,876 illegal connections to a pipeline were removed out of the 5,570 that were discovered.
“Some of the scale of the infraction that we see is unbelievable. We are not able to deal with it. When you remove one connection, the next day in the same location, someone will replace it.
“It is obvious that crude oil theft is almost an end-to-end issue in Nigeria; it is very obvious that everyone is involved.
“In most of these locations, they are less than a hundred meters from the settlement, some are even less than a hundred meters from the local government headquarters”, he said
