Kyari in Senate, Says Pipeline Vandalisation a National Calamity

•Says over 5,000km pipeline redundant

Sunday Aborisade in Abuja

The Group Chief Executive Officer, Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) has described as national calamity the destruction of over 5,000 kilometers of oil pipelines by vandals  across the country.

The Chief Executive Officer of the NNPCL,  Mele Kyari, stated this during an interactive session with the Senate Committee on Petroleum ( Downstream).

He, however, assured Nigerians that the nation’s four oil refineries would be made functional very soon .

He said the problem of oil pipeline vandalism had been bedeviling the sector over the decades as the company had not been able to pump oil through pipeline from Warri to Benin within the last 22 years .

Kyari said, “Over 5,000 kilometers oil pipelines  in the country  are not working As a result of pipeline vandalism, 10 million litres of oil was lost from the volume pumped from Aba to Enugu at a time .

“The company has been unable to pump oil from Warri to Benin within the last 22 years and cannot connect to Ore .

“There is no amount of security measures that had not been taken to curb the crime  without success, which to us in NNPCL , is substantially a national calamity,” he said.

He, however, said as a way out , the company was embarking on massive replacement of the pipelines which aside being vandalised were old and obsolete .

He explained further to the committee that deregulation of the oil sector and in particular, subsidy removal carried out in May this year , has turned NNPCL into a profitable company .

According to him, before deregulation in 2018, the company made a loss of N802 billion but after deregulation in 2021, made an excess profit of N687 billion.

He added that while 67 million litres of oil was consumed per day during the era of subsidy regime,  average of 55 million litres are being consumed on a daily basis now, just as the problem of smuggling the product across borders has become a thing of the past .

The Chairman of the Committee, Senator Ifeanyi Ubah (APC Anambra South) and all the members responded separately to submissions made by the NNPCL boss that proper dissection of challenges facing the sector would be better made in a retreat .

But Senator Seriake Dickson ( PDP Bayelsa West ), told the NNPCL boss to look critically into the surveillance security contract the company was operating as regards non inclusion of some oil producing areas .

“Some local government areas in Bayelsa State like Sagbama where i come from, are not covered by the contract with attendant consequences,” he said.