Shell Resumes Forcados Crude Export After Suspension

By Adedapo Adesanya

Shell Nigeria has resumed exports of the country’s Forcados grade of crude oil on Sunday, a spokesperson of the oil major said on Monday, according to Reuters.

This is coming roughly a month after loadings of the medium sweet grade were suspended because of a potential leak at the export terminal.

Sources had told Reuters that exports of the grade, which was scheduled to ship 220,000 barrels per day in July, were halted on the evening of July 12 after workers saw fumes near a single buoy mooring where oil was being loaded onto a vessel.

A single buoy mooring is essentially a floating loading facility that allows large tankers to moor offshore to discharge cargoes.

Shell confirmed that injections into the terminal had been curtailed after the report, though no force majeure was declared.

The Shell spokesperson said the cause of the suspension would be determined by a joint investigation between company and community representatives in tandem with government agencies.

The suspension of Forcados loadings contributed to Nigeria becoming the second-biggest contributor to the drop in crude oil output of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in July.

Nigeria’s daily oil production in the month of July 2023 fell by 13.6 per cent to average 1.08 million barrels per day compared to 1.25 million barrels per day recorded in June, the latest production data from the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) has indicated.

The latest production figure is a major setback for the government, which has a production target of 1.69 million barrels per day in the 2023 budget. The volume of production is also significantly lower than the 1.7 million barrels per day production quota allocated to the country by OPEC.

The Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited has said it expects oil production to hit 1.8 million barrels per day by the fourth quarter of this year as measures put in place to boost production begin to yield results.