Nigeria resumed operations on its Trans Forcados oil pipeline, a senior oil official said on Monday, bringing back on stream part of the network whose closure also led to a near halving of the country’s gas production.
The pipeline, which had been shut for a week due to sabotage, resumed on Saturday afternoon, David Ige, executive director of gas and power at Nigerian National Petroleum Corp, told Reuters.
It transports the Forcados crude oil grade in the delta region and was scheduled to export about 260,000 barrels per day in January and 210,000 bpd in February.
The west African crude market is already oversupplied, so the resumption had little immediate impact on prices.
The outage also halted a significant part of Nigeria’s natural gas production. Gas fields had to be shut down because the condensate they produce alongside the gas is normally evacuated via Forcados.
“Forcados is a major artery…when this pipeline is out we lose gas production… (It) accounts for 40-50 percent of gas production in the country,” Ige said.
Each time the pipeline goes down, two power plants also lose input and electricity supplies for the east of the country are affected, he said
Source: Reuters
