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Nigeria Complying With OPEC Cuts, Sylva Tells Bloomberg

October 29, 2019

Nigeria’s production output was recently increased to 1.774m barrels per day by OPEC following several appeals.

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Nigeria has aligned its oil production to the quota restriction set by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

This is what the country’s Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Sylva, told Bloomberg in an interview in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday.

Nigeria’s production output was recently increased to 1.774m barrels per day by OPEC following several appeals.

Prior to the increase, the country was not obeying the cuts, according to figures published by Reuters and the International Energy Agency.

This development and the location of the statement is timely as Saudi Arabia had promised not to make any further cuts at OPEC’s December 2019 meeting unless it received assurances from Nigeria and Iraq that they would be 100 per cent compliant to the agreement reached in December 2018 and implemented since January 2019.

Sylva also informed Bloomberg that Saudi’s Energy Minister, Abdulaziz Bin Salman, assured him that the Arab kingdom will cut more than its own share of cuts to keep the price of the product stable.

“He assured me that they are very ready to even cut deeper,” Sylva said.

He however noted that he didn’t discuss how deep the volume of new output restrictions will be with the Saudi prince.

Just as it called on Russia to help with building its refineries, Nigeria has also extended the same request to the Saudis.

“We are also discussing the possibility of fixing one of our refineries with the Saudis and then we are also discussing the development of an oil and gas industrial pact in the Niger Delta,” he added.

President Muhammadu Buhari and an entourage including Sylva and the Group Managing Director of the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation, Mele Kyari, are in Saudi Arabia to discourse investments.

Buhari and a similar team of people just left Russia where they signed a series of memoranda to tackle terrorism, build refineries and improve the country’s stretched transport infrastructure.

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Oil