Earnings from oil and gas production in June were down by 44.65 per cent, indicating a value reduction of about $226.38 million between May and June 2019, data from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) have shown.
NNPC, in its June 2019 monthly financial and operations report, stated that in May, the sales value of oil and gas production in Nigeria was $547.61 million. This, however, dropped to $321.23 million in June.
The full content of the report was posted on the NNPC webpage.
It said within the month under review, its under-recovery – a term it uses in place of subsidy payments for petrol consumption in the country, reduced from N102,338,409,727 in May to N30,637,245,949 in June.
Additionally, it lost N4,730,839,707 to oil theft in June as against N5,657,069,733 lost to same in May, but could not cut down its expenditure on repairs of pipeline in June when it spent N16,812,746,932 as against the N12,430,497,197 spent in May.
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“A total export sale of $321.23 million was recorded in June 2019; a decrease of 44.65 per cent compared to the previous month,” said the report.
According to it: “Crude oil export sales contributed $248.22 million (77.27 per cent) of the dollar transactions compared with $458.59 million contribution in the previous month.
“Also, the export gas sales amounted to $73.01 million in the month. The June 2018 to June 2019 crude oil and gas transactions indicated that crude oil and gas worth $5.98 billion was exported.”
Although the oil corporation did not specifically state the reasons for the reduction in oil revenue, it acknowledged that there was a decline in oil price in the international market even when Nigeria’s oil production rose slightly by about 0.04 per cent.
“This month, average crude oil price dropped for the second consecutive month by $7.32 or 10.72 per cent m-o-m (month-on-month) to average $61.02/b. In the same vein, ICE Brent in June 2019 dropped by $7.27, or 10.3 per cent m-o-m at $63.04/b while NYMEX WTI decreased by $6.16 or 10.1 per cent m-o-m to average $54.71/b.