The Anglo-Dutch energy giant Shell has ended the latest crisis to disrupt oil production in Nigeria’s unruly Niger Delta, the firm said on Friday, reopening facilities closed down by community protests.
Six weeks after angry villagers from the ethnic Ijaw fishing community of Kula stormed oil-flow stations in the delta, company engineers have brought the pumps back on line, a spokesperson for Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary said.
At the height of the crisis, 114 000 barrels per day of Shell’s production and 20 000 from it United States rival ChevronTexaco were shut in.
The firms warned their clients that they will fail to honour their January export contracts.
The Shell Petroleum Development Company spokesperson could not immediately confirm whether production has returned to full capacity but expected to be able to do so in the course of the day.
”Ekulama I is up,” he said, meaning the plant was on line.
Over the past week, Shell has reopened three more plants — Belema, Santa Barbara and Ekulama II — which were also briefly held by protesters from Kula, 80km south-west of Port Harcourt.
Shell is still negotiating with protesters from a second community who last week occupied and shut down the Odeama Creek flow station, cutting supplies to the Bonny export terminal by a further 8 000 barrels per day, he said.
The villagers were protesting because a power generator provided for them by Shell had broken down and they expected the company to repair it.
”We are still repairing the generator. Hopefully by next week the job will have been done and we will restart the plant,” the spokesperson.
Nigeria is Africa’s biggest oil producer — and the sixth-largest exporter in the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries cartel — while Shell’s fields account for about half of a daily supply of 2,5-million barrels of crude, most of it destined for the US market.
But despite living on top of this multibillion-dollar resource, the vast majority of Nigeria’s 130-million-strong population lives in abject poverty, with three-quarters of the people struggling on less than $1 per day.
The problems of underdevelopment and youth unemployment are particularly acute in the delta, the heartland of the oil industry, where villages built beside billion-dollar oil terminals go without electricity and clean water.
Over recent years, repeated local crises — ethnic uprisings, communal protests, pirate attacks and kidnappings — have disrupted production and sent shockwaves through already volatile international oil markets.
On December 25 last year, ethnic Ijaw militants kidnapped a Croatian sailor working for a Shell subcontractor on the creeks of the western delta in protest at what they claimed was the firm’s failure to honour a development contract.
He was freed unharmed three days later.
And on November 20, Nigerian soldiers based at Shell’s Benisede flow station on the Bomadi Creek opened fire during a scuffle with protesters who were attempting to occupy a mobile drilling rig, injuring at least 17 people.
Village leaders from the Ojobo community claim that eight more protesters were killed in the clash, and showed reporters fresh graves, but the army denies this. Shell has opened an internal inquiry into the incident.
The waterways of the delta — a Scotland-sized swathe of creeks and mangrove swamp on Nigeria’s Atlantic coast — are home to several heavily armed ethnic militias and pirate gangs, which profit by looting and blackmailing oil firms.
Experts estimate that organised gangs steal more than 100 000 barrels of crude from illegally tapped pipelines every day. It is towed from the creeks in barges and loaded on to tankers for export to unscrupulous foreign refineries. — Sapa-AFP