Nigeria’s NNPC adopts Saudi Aramco’s security model to curb oil theft

Nigeria has decided to adopt the security infrastructure similar to that of Saudi Arabia’s oil giant Aramco to protect its oil pipelines and curb theft.
According to the CEO of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC), Mele Kyari, the new security architecture would be unveiled soon and help to curb massive oil pipeline vandalism that has resulted in the country losing 30% of produced volumes to crude thieves. Saudi Aramco’s model is based on using video surveillance that will monitor NNPC pipelines carrying crude oil from wells to flow stations in the Niger Delta. Africa’s biggest oil producer has been unable to meet its OPEC quota since the beginning of this year due to rampant theft and vandalism. Output fell to 1.43 million barrels a day in the three months through June, the lowest quarterly production since 2016, according to Nigeria’s statistics agency.
Meanwhile, Nigeria’s Chief of Naval Staff (CNS), Vice Admiral Awwal Gambo, has disputed oil theft figures provided by NNPCL and the Ministry of Petroleum Resources. Gambo said that it wasn’t possible to steal between 200,000 to 400,000 barrels per day, as NNPCL and the ministry claim. He noted that the data may not only be from oil theft, maintaining that the government authorities were making the error of calculating losses due to force majeure as well as shut-ins as part of oil being stolen. According to Gambo, oil losses could be as a result of metering errors on the operating platforms, stressing that the volume of crude oil shut-ins from non-production are often added to oil theft data instead of accounting for them as oil losses by the authorities.