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| Oil refinery |
Global oil benchmark,
Brent crude, extended its rally on Sunday to hit the US$50 per barrel mark, the
third time this year.
Media
report continues:
This
comes as the expected return of the Forcados export terminal has helped to
boost Nigeria’s planned crude oil exports this month to about 1.98 million
barrels per day, the most since January.
Forcados,
whose export has been suspended since February after militant attack on the
export line, is one of Nigeria’s largest crude grades with an average output of
about 200,000 bpd last year.
No
tankers have loaded from the terminal so far, according to Bloomberg ship-tracking
data. Eight cargoes are scheduled to load this month with another six planned
for November.
The
recent upsurge in militant attacks in the Niger Delta pushed oil shipments, the
nation’s biggest export, to as low as 1.38 million bpd in August from a high of
2.1 million bpd in January.
The
Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu, last week, noted
that the country had lost an average of 500,000 to 700,000 bpd over the last
six to eight months.
Commenting
on the militancy in an interview with Bloomberg, the minister said the
government was doing all it could to address the problem, adding that oil
production had risen to 1.7 million bpd, up from a low of 1.2 million bpd about
two months ago.
Kachikwu
said, “We think that if we can finalize the dialogues in the month of October,
which is my anticipation, we should be able to get ourselves to end the year at
about an average of two million barrels.”
Oil
prices have been on an uptrend since the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries decided to cut output for the first time in eight years.
Brent,
against which half of the world’s oil is priced, had risen to around US$48 per
barrel last Wednesday after OPEC agreed to reduce production, compared to US$45
earlier in the day.
It
stood at US$50.19 per barrel as of 4.53pm Nigerian time on Sunday, up from
around US$49.66 per barrel on Thursday.
OPEC agreed to cut production to a range of 32.5 million barrels per day to 33 million bpd from around 33.5 million bpd.
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