‘Nigeria raked in $206bn from exports in five years’ – OPEC

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By Francis Ogwo

‌Nigeria’s earnings from crude oil exports in the last five years have been estimated at $206.06bn.

This is according to reports from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

According to OPEC’s report in its 2020 Annual Statistical Bulletin released on Monday, Nigeria, which is Africa’s top oil producer had its revenue fall to $45.11bn in 2019 from $54.51bn in 2018.

As at 2019, Nigeria was the fifth biggest revenue earner in OPEC behind Saudi Arabia ($202.37bn), Iraq ($80.03bn), Kuwait ($52.43bn) and the United Arab Emirates ($49.64bn).

Also, Nigeria earned $37.98bn from oil exports in 2017 as compared to $27.29bn in 2016 and $41.17bn in 2015.

Revenue accruing to the country from crude oil exports to Europe, according to the report, dropped to 680,600bpd in 2019 from 1.06 million bpd in 2018.

There was a slump of 84% to 27,500bpd in 2019 of the volume of oil exported to North America while exports to Africa fell by 15.77% to 260,700bpd while the country’s exports to Asia and the Pacific rose by 71.72% to 664,900bpd in 2019, while exports to the Middle East rose from zero to 122,300bpd.

Slumping prices also led to OPEC’s 13 members suffering an 18.4% contraction in their oil export revenue in 2019 while the price of Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, averaged $64 per barrel in 2019, down from $71 per barrel in 2018, according to the US Energy Information Agency.

The report also reveals that the value of OPEC petroleum export revenue dropped to $564.9bn in 2019 from $692.3bn in 2018 as weak demand growth and continued competition from non-OPEC producers had an effect on the group.

According to the figures, the financial pain OPEC was already facing even before the coronavirus pandemic depleted nearly a fifth of global oil demand in the second quarter of 2020, according to S&P Global Platts.

There has been an effort by the producer group to prop up the market through production cuts, as the oil-dependent governments try to defend prices over market share even as the report showed that OPEC cut its production by 1.86 million bpd, or 6%, last year, while non-OPEC output grew by 1.3 million bpd, or 2.9%.

This was as the group is in the fourth year of coordinated production cuts with 10 allies, which included Russia.

Conclusively, the deal for 2019 called for 1.2 million bpd in combined cuts between the 23 countries, though core Gulf OPEC members; Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait made major voluntary contributions to creating a positive turnover for the market.

The economic hardship of the pandemic with its uncertainties and closure of global industries, experts opine, would have an in unpredictable impact on the market before year-end 2020.

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