• Nigeria makes $470m from oil, gas exports
State-owned refineries are to be revived in 2020 after financing talks dragged on.
“It is not likely to happen by the end of 2019 because the financing talks for the joint ventures took longer than expected,” the Minister of State for Petroleum, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu, said in Cape Town, South Africa.
The facilities, which have long operated at a fraction of their capacity, began looking for private partners last year to help improve output.
Funding is to be secured next month, with two years required to bring the plants closer to their full combined capacity of 445,000 barrels a day, Bloomberg quoted Kachikwu as saying.
He has offered to quit if the nation fails to meet its fuel needs locally by next year.
Meanwhile, the wind changed again in a stormy oil market as the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) said it would cut output next year, potentially making the second production U-turn this year.
Amid a summer of rising prices and unprecedented political pressure from President Donald Trump, Saudi Arabia, Russia and other producers had opened the taps. Now, with the United States midterm elections over and crude futures wilting in the face of another historic shale oil surge, the cartel is to discuss a change of course this weekend.
However, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) said crude oil and gas exports for August fetched in $470 million, indicating an increase of $78 million compared to July’s $391.91 million figures.
In the NNPC Monthly Financial and Operations report for the period released yesterday in Abuja by its Group General Manager, Group Public Affairs, Mr. Ndu Ughamadu, the corporation indicated that crude oil export contributed $337.62 million in comparison with the $283.43 million gotten the previous month.
The document noted that gas sales during the period were $132.38 million, adding that oil and gas transactions for a year were $5.26 billion.
NNPC further explained that a receipt of $450.24 million was recorded in August against the $382.65 million tally of July.
Contribution from crude during the period, it stated, amounted to $336.43 million while gas and miscellaneous receipts stood at $101.33million and $12.48 million.
A further breakdown shows that $142.31 million was remitted to the Federation Account while $307.93 million went into funding of joint venture (JV) cost recovery to guarantee current and future production.
