Nigeria May Push for Higher OPEC Oil Quota, NNPC Says

By Carli Lourens

March 9 (Bloomberg) -- Nigeria may seek to increase its OPEC oil production quota if output remains free from militant disruption, an official from state-owned Nigeria National Petroleum Corp. said today.

Attacks by armed groups in the Niger River delta, home to Africa’s largest oil and gas industry, cut more than 25 percent of Nigeria’s crude production in the four years through 2009. Output has recovered after a government amnesty program last year prompted thousands of fighters to disarm.

Crude oil production has averaged 1.5 million to 1.7 million barrels a day this year, Austen Oniwon, group executive director for refining and petrochemicals at NNPC said in an interview in Cape Town today. The country is producing 2.3 million barrels a day of crude and condensate combined, he said.

“If the amnesty prevails and there’s no disruption, we intend to sustain that and probably make a case to OPEC to increase the limit,” Austen Oniwon, group executive director for refining and petrochemicals at state-owned Nigeria National Petroleum Corp., said in an interview in Cape Town today.

Nigeria’s production limit as a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries is about 1.67 million barrels of crude oil a day. Output has risen from a low of 1.75 million barrels a day in July last year to around 1.94 million barrels a day in February, according to Bloomberg estimates.

Separately, NNPC may list on a stock exchange within 30 months of a new petroleum industry bill being approved, Oniwon said. NNPC hopes the Petroleum Industry Bill, which seeks to consolidate and modernize bills made over the past 40 years, will be reviewed before the middle of the year, he said.

-- With assistance from Dulue Mbachu in Lagos and Alexander Kwiatkowski in London. Editor: Rob Verdonck