Oil giant Shell says it paid the Nigerian government $4.32 billion in 2017 nearly 19 per cent from the $3.64 billion it paid in 2016, according to its annual sustainability report released on Monday.
The company noted that the bulk of the $3.197 billion payments made to the oil-rich country, went to state oil company Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, for production entitlement.
The report revealed that crude oil theft from pipelines of Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary SPDC increased by some 50 per cent, rising to roughly 9,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 2017 from 6,000 bpd in 2016.
Shell said the shutdown of the Forcados export terminal for much of 2016 “reduced opportunities for third-party interference”
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“Sabotage-related oil spill incidents rose to 62, from 48 in 2016, though the volume spilled fell to 1,400 tonnes, from 3,900 tonnes in 2016,” Shell said.
The company’s operational spills in Nigeria rose by one to nine in 2017, but it said the volume of oil spilled fell to 100 tonnes from 300 tonnes in 2016.
The company said that theft and sabotage accounted for 90 per cent of Nigerian oil spills.
Shell said SPDC also “made $10 million available” in 2017 to help set up the Hydrocarbon Pollution and Remediation Project (HYPREP), a government-led body to clean up contaminated sites, and that it developed with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) a new framework for remediation of soil and groundwater that it will begin testing in 2018
