Leak halts Nigeria oil

[Richard Akindele]

LAGOS, NIGERIA -- Oil companies in Nigeria have shut off 210,000 barrels of daily crude production after an unexplained leak on a shared pipeline.

It was not immediately known what caused the leak in the line used by Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Chevron Corp. and others.

The pipeline was shut down over the weekend. Authorities are trying to determine what caused it, but residents in the region were preventing them from getting to the site to investigate, a Shell spokesperson said.

The spokesperson said that until preliminary investigations were complete, it was impossible to say when the problem could be repaired. He declined to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media about the matter.

Nigeria's volatile Niger Delta region has been the scene of frequent disputes between oil companies and communities who have for years demanded a greater share of the wealth of Africa's largest crude producer.

Nigeria is Africa's largest oil exporter and the fifth-largest supplier of crude to the United States. The country produces about 2.5 million barrels of oil daily.

With the leak, Shell and three partners involved in a joint venture were forced to shut 180,000 barrels a day of production, bringing the company's total loss in Nigeria to 653,000 barrels a day in production. The Anglo-Dutch giant normally pumps more than half of 2.5 million barrels of oil in Nigeria each day, but it has suffered several attacks by armed militants this year.

The London Free Press