Shell: Nigeria Payments, Oil Theft Climbed in 2017
Shell's payments to the Nigerian government grew to $4.32 billion in 2017, up nearly 19 percent from $3.64 billion in 2016, according to its annual sustainability report released on Monday.
The bulk of the payments, $3.197 billion, went to state oil company NNPC for production entitlement.
Crude oil theft from pipelines of Shell's Nigerian subsidiary SPDC increased by some 50 percent, rising to roughly 9,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 2017 from 6,000 bpd in 2016, the report said.
Shell said the shutdown of the Forcados export terminal for much of 2016 "reduced opportunities for third-party interference."
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'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 account for 90 percent 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.
Reporting by Libby George and Shadia Nasralla
