A former Director of the defunct Department of Petroleum Resources, Ben Osuno, has lamented the drop in the country’s oil production.
Osuno spoke Thursday in Lagos at a colloquium organised in his honour ahead of his 88th birthday.
Osuno said the country’s crude oil had reduced from 2.4 million barrels per day in the 90s to less than 1.7m currently.
He said the decline occurred despite the country having more people and more funds to do the job.
According to Osuno, the current delay caused by the number of regulators in both the downstream and upstream sectors has made granting approvals more cumbersome and expensive.
“Some years ago, we were doing 2.4mbpd, and very few companies were working. No problems. Today, there are many more companies and much more money.
“The control of the industry is too heavy, yet you cannot produce 1mbpd. If you do 1.7mbpd you are happy. And you spend so much money to control that 1.7mbpd. When it was 2.4mbpd, how much was being spent to supervise
“Many things we can do on phone then are not being done today. Now to do one thing, it costs a lot of money and time, even to get one approval. So much money is being spent on the supervision of the industry. Why can’t it be streamlined so that the amount spent on supervising and regulating is reduced? So that there can be more efficiency in the system,” he said.
Osuno maintained that what two persons could do before, “now you need about 20 to 25 people to do it”.
“These are the issues if we look back into history, how things were done efficiently. Why can’t we be as efficient these days? We have more people, more educated, younger bloods, but why is everything getting more complicated?
Osuno, a former head of Corporation’s Exploration and Production Division of the then Nigerian National Oil Company/Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, was also the Nigeria’s governor to the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries from 1979 to 1990.
He was the chairman of African Petroleum, now Ardova, from 2006 to 2007.
The PUNCH reports that Nigeria’s crude oil production rose to 1.418mbpd in December 2023, according to the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
OPEC, in its Monthly Oil Market Report for January 2024, said Nigeria’s crude oil production increased by 100mb/d, from 1.319mbpd in November, according to secondary sources.
In the report released on January 17, OPEC disclosed, according to direct communication, that the nation’s oil production in December stood at 1.335mpbd, as against 1.250mbpd in November.
