Nigeria begs foreign buyers to label stolen crude as blood oil
The Informant247 – Authorities in Nigeria have called on the international community to support the country’s fight against oil theft by labelling any stolen crude as blood oil.
“Oil theft is not very unique to Nigeria, many countries have dealt with it even in the very recent past but also required concerted international efforts, just like the world did for blood diamonds, the Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation Limited, Mele Kyari told the country’s International Economic Partnership Forum in New York on Thursday.
“I think this is a very good opportunity to request that at the level of diplomats, that the honourable minister of foreign affairs take this to that level [for countries] to label any theft of oil from Nigeria coming to the market as blood oil. That’s surely a short-term issue: we know that many things are going wrong in our country today concerning this situation. But despite this, we would continue selling to the international community. The utilisation of stolen oil is not in our country, not even in Africa, but out there and the international community needs to support us to contend with this because oil has traces, oil has signatures.”
He said international buyers can actually tell the source of the oil they are buying, urging them treat any Nigerian oil from unofficial channels the same way blood diamonds were treated in the recent past.
“[Stolen oil] can be sold, we have put up structures to make sure that it can be identified clearly on our webpages that we have created, you can always validate the product and sales that are from us,” he said.
Kyari assured investors that Nigeria is safe and open for business in oil, and particularly gas.
Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari had earlier expressed concern over the spate of insurgency in the country, saying it was affecting the country’s oil revenue.
He said the activities of the Boko Haram in the northeast and insurgency in the southeast were preventing the country from realising its full potential as an oil-producing country.
“If Nigerians would recollect, between 1999 and 2015 when we came, I like people to check; OPEC projection was 2.1 million barrels per day at $100 per barrel,” Buhari said during a working visit to oil-rich Imo state in the southern region early September.
Earlier this year, Nigeria’s oil regulators said the country lost $1 billion in revenue during the first quarter of this year due to crude theft, which authorities blamed on militants operating in the oil-rich Niger-Delta region.
