Production from the recently launched Egina deepwater field would remain outside Nigeria's commitment to stick to OPEC's production cuts, according to state-held Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).
"[I]t is not part of the volumes we look at," NNPC Group's Managing Director Maikanti Baru told Reuters on Thursday, asked if Egina's production would count as crude oil or condensate.
Nigeria currently produces around 1.8 million bpd of crude oil and another 400,000 bpd of condensate, NNPC's manager said at an oil and gas conference in London.
"In terms of the OPEC quota, I think it's not a cut in production, it's to ensure we keep the quota. Of course the president said it and we will obey," Reuters quoted Baru as saying, noting that the new field would be classified as condensate.
Days before OPEC's production cuts started on January 1, France's Total had started up oil production from Nigeria's ultra-deepwater oil field Egina, which is expected to pump 200,000 bpd at peak output.
Total noted that the plateau production at the field of 200,000 bpd would account for some 10 percent of Nigeria's oil production.
Nigeria, which wasn't spared from the new OPEC/non-OPEC production cuts this time around, is expected to contribute with up to 40,000 bpd to the 800,000 bpd OPEC had pledged to cut from January, Nigerian Oil Minister Emmanuel Kachikwu told local news outlet THISDAY in December. The 40,000-bpd figure is some 2.5 percent of Nigeria's current crude oil production of 1.7 million bpd, the minister said in the first half of December.
In the official OPEC document released weeks after the new OPEC+ deal was struck, Nigeria's share of the cuts is 53,000 bpd from the October 2018 level of 1.738 million bpd, to 1.685 million bpd for the period January-June 2019.
According to OPEC's secondary sources, Nigeria's crude oil production rose by 52,000 bpd from December 2018 to 1.792 million bpd in January 2019, despite Nigeria not being exempt from the OPEC cuts this time around.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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Tsvetana is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing for news outlets such as iNVEZZ and SeeNews. More