Nigeria not gaining from soaring oil price – Sylva

Minister of State for Peteroleun, Timipre Sylva says the soaring oil price is not good for Nigeria as the country is not gaining anything from it.

Sylva said this in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Thursday.

According to him, Nigeria’s comfort zone in terms of oil prices was between $70 and $80 per barrel.

Western Post reported that crude oil price soared about $100 per barrel for the first time since 2014 due to Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

Brent crude oil sold for $102.48 per barrel on Thursday, its highest since September, while the U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures jumped $4.85, or 5.3 per cent, to $96.95 a barrel, after rising to as much as $97.40, the highest since August 2014, Reuters reported.

Russia is the world’s second-largest oil producer, mostly selling its crude to European refineries, and the largest supplier of natural gas to Europe, providing about 35 per cent of the latter’s supply.

“I’m hopeful the prices will move around, maybe $80, maybe $70. We are hoping it will come down to somewhere around $70 to $80, which will be sustainable for us to the end of the year,” Sylva said.

He also spoke on Nigeria’s production capacity. According to him, the country was losing at least 300,000 bpd to its capacity challenge.

“We are working hard on that (production increase). What happened to us was the fact that we had to cut back at the time, and, of course, in such a way you can’t cut back mathematically,” he said.

“So, you want to cut back 100,000 barrels that you shut out, maybe we’ll shut down about 200,000 to 300,000 barrels. So, at the end of the day, we over-complied because we just couldn’t achieve it mathematically.

“In trying to cut down, we cut down too much. And now to come back, it’s not been easy for us to get the wells back to production.”