Government Needs 900,000B/d Oil output To offset Budget Deficit

                            

Following the decline in oil production from the projected 2.2million barrels per day (mb/d) to an average of 1.5mb/d, the Federal Government has planned to make up for the shortfall in the 2016 budget with an excess production of 900,000 mb/d when normalcy returns to the restive Niger Delta.


The Minister of State for Petroleum, Dr. Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu, made this known in a conversation with Richard Quest on CNN’s Quest Means Business, yesterday.

Kachikwu said government has made adjustment  for the excess production since it appeared that it would be difficult to realise the 2.2mbd production budgeted for in this year’s budget.

His words: “It is going to be difficult to catch up with the 2.2million barrels on which the 2016 budget was based. But we are certainly going to try, once things have calmed down and there is full production. We will need 900,000 bpd excess production to catch up and that is the projection that we are working on now.”
He however admitted that production has declined in the last five months of continuous militancy in the Niger Delta. He however expressed optimism that the crisis could become history in the next few months, saying that government has been making frantic efforts at engaging, dialoguing with the stakeholders to resolve the crisis in the region.

He said : “Yes it is a difficult time but like you rightly said, production is average of 1.5million barrels per day. And we intend to get along: first reason it is because of the militancy problem we have in the Niger Delta.

“We are putting a lot of energy around it. There is a lot of dialogue, a lot of engagements, a lot of security meetings to try and resolve this. President Muhammadu Buhari is very concerned about this .

“Executive time is being given to this. We are expecting and hoping that over the next one month, two months, we will find some final solutions that will bring solution up. Once we have done that , it is obvious that we have lost quite some months, five six months of continuos problems.”