Niger Delta Avengers blow up 2 Chevron pipelines

· Oil firm shuts down operations after attack

· FG, N/Delta leaders woo militants

 

Niger Delta militants between midnight on Wednesday and the early hours of yesterday continued their bombing of oil facilities in the region by blowing up two crit­ical pipelines owned by Chev­ron Nigeria Limited.

The nascent Niger Del­ta Avengers (NDA), which claimed responsibility for the attack, said it struck because the American oil giant flouted its May 12, 2016 warning not to fix a major pipeline it had destroyed.

 In its twitter handle, the group said: “We Warned #Chevron but they didn’t Lis­ten. @NDAvengers just blew up the Escravos tank farm Main Electricity Feed Pipe­line.”

One of the pipelines affect­ed in the latest attacks supplies gas that provides electricity to the Escravos tank farm in Del­ta State.

The attacks came on the heels of the expiration of a two-week ultimatum the mil­itant group issued to some oil blocs’ owners to halt their ex­ploration because of the ‘con­tinued marginalisation of the people of the region.’

The AUTHORITY learnt that the first attack occurred during Wednesday’s down­pour in the area while the sec­ond occurred after midnight.

It was also gathered that an underground Chevron crude oil trunk line along the Ceria Creek near Abiteye was dam­aged by the explosions.

Military sources told The AUTHORITY that the im­pacts of the attacks were first noticed by workers in the Pro­duction Department when they observed a drop in the production pressure.

Although details of the in­cident were sketchy at the time of filing this report, a senior Chevron official confirmed it, saying the attacks occurred at midnight on Wednesday.

The source said a techni­cal team of engineers had been dispatched to the scene of the spill to ascertain the true cause.

He said: “Information available to us revealed that the Ceria Creek and all ad­joining creeks of Abiteye have now been covered with mas­sive oil spill emanating from the trunk line.”

A Chevron security offi­cial added that “the explosions occurred while it was rain­ing,” adding: “There are two Chevron gas lines, which are the onshore and offshore. It is the offshore pipeline that was affected while the other one is a crude oil line. The affect­ed pipelines are located be­tween the Chevron tank farm and Ceria near Abiteye com­munity.”

Chevron’s spokesman, Deji Haastrup did not pick calls put to his lines while an electronic mail sent to him was also not replied at the time of filing this report.

The AUTHORITY, how­ever, learnt that the bombing of the twin facilities has forced Chevron to shut down its op­erations in the area.

Since the Escravos onshore production accounts for al­most a third of Chevron’s total output, on average 3.8 million barrels monthly, the compa­ny’s projected exports for the first 2016 have significantly dropped.

Agency reports claimed that Escravos production was short by over 40,000 barrels daily after the May 5 militant attack on a Chevron offshore facility.

Meanwhile, the grow­ing unrest in the Niger Delta and wildfires in Canada have reduced world crude output by four million barrels daily thereby pushing price above $50.

Reuters and the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) re­ported yesterday that Brent oil climbed above $50 a barrel for the first time in nearly seven months.

This is an indication that the global supply glut that plagued the market for near­ly two years is showing signs of easing.

Oil prices have rallied in recent weeks after a string of outages due mainly to wildfires in Canada and unrest in Nige­ria and Libya.

Above $50 a barrel, oil was seen by many market players as breaching a psychological bar­rier that could lead producers, particularly among the United States (US) shale companies to revive operations scrapped in recent years.

Global benchmark Brent crude oil LCOc1 was up 36 cents at 50.10 dollars a bar­rel, the highest in nearly sev­en months.

The upsurge was due to a larger-than-expected draw in U.S. crude oil inventories, which last week indicated buyers are starting to mop up spare supplies.

Meanwhile, the Federal Government has challenged host communities and state governors in in the Niger Delta to protect oil facilities in their areas.

The government in a statement by the Group Gen­eral Manager, Public Affairs Division of the Nigerian Na­tional Petroleum Corpora­tion (NNPC), Garba Deen Mohammed, at the end of a stakeholders’ meeting in Abuja, called on the youths to end the attacks.

Mohammed stated that the stakeholders from the Niger Delta region resolved to work together to stop at­tacks on critical oil and gas installations and ensure se­curity, stability and eco­nomic development of the area.

He said the Minister of State for Petroleum Re­sources and Group Manag­ing Director of the NNPC, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu expressed Federal Government’s readi­ness to check the resurgence of pipeline sabotage in the region.

Kachikwu said all the stake­holders resolved that solutions to the incessant attacks on oil and gas pipelines are within the communities, stressing that communities are now saddled with the responsibility of ensur­ing protection of pipelines with­in their domain.

The minister added that all the states in the region would nominate four or five represent­atives that would work hand-in-hand with security agencies to secure oil facilities in their re­spective states.

He further was resolved, he said, that violence is not an option in resolving the prob­lems of the Niger Delta and that all threats from the region should end henceforth.

He added that there is need to reach out to all oth­er stakeholders who were not part of the meeting to em­brace peace and dialogue.

According to him, there is also need to restructure the Amnesty Programme so as to address the critical issue of ne­glect by the government and international oil companies.