Nigeria is not gaining from the rising oil prices, Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Sylva has lamented.
Gatekeepers News earlier reported that the global oil benchmark rose over 5 percent on Thursday to trade at $102.27 a barrel, the highest since 2014, amid the Russia-Ukraine crisis.
Sylva, while speaking during an interview with Bloomberg Television, said that Nigeria’s comfort zone in terms of oil prices was between $70 and $80 per barrel.
“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.
“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 really cut back mathematically.
“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.”
Additional investments would be needed to ramp up production, according to the Minister who lamented that foreign funding was drying out for the industry.
“It’s not very easy these days to get the investments in. We really are not able to meet up our quota now. But I believe that we’re working so very hard to ensure that, because we are not happy at all.
“I mean, with the kind of prices we are seeing. We are obviously not happy about it. So we would like to definitely be back on track by later this year. It’s not been very easy to get investments. A lot of people can’t get investments into the sector.”
On the moves made to change the dire investment situation, Sylva: “So we’re looking at how we can get our African energy bank set up. Also, we’re looking at how we can rally multilateral funding into financial institutions.
“We are talking to Afreximbank. We’re working with other African producers to try to rally some funding for our sector in Africa, because we cannot continue to depend on funding that’s not coming.”
