Nigeria’s Crude Oil Will Dry Up in 37 Years

Geologists and critical stakeholders in the oil sector have raised an alarm that Nigeria's crude oil reserve would be totally depleted in the next 37 years precisely by 2048.

These stakeholders are currently worried that with a production output of 2.5 million barrels of oil per day.

Nigeria currently depletes about 1 billion barrels of crude oil annually from its 37.2 billion barrels of hydrocarbon reserves.

They say the looming danger can only be averted if the federal government urgently creates aggressive policies of hydrocarbon reserves replacement.

This was the position of Mr. Guy Maurice, Managing Director of Total Upstream Companies in Nigeria, at the opening of a very important oil industry conference in Lagos on Monday.

According to him, policies must be put in place for industry to gain a lot of time in the contracting cycle, especially by drastically shortening and reducing the time to access rigs for exploration in the Nigerian waters.

In his words: “The country should make reserves replacement a priority. If we take a critical look at perspectives for growing reserves in the next decade, the answer is exploration, exploration and more explorations to run parallel to development projects, which are also becoming more and more expensive to execute, due to slippages in complex contractual environment, couple with security challenges.”

The conference which had the theme - 'Perspectives on Growing Hydrocarbon Reserves in the Next Decade' - is one of the annual major conferences and exhibition in the oil and gas industry.