Nigeria's oil production, including condensates, increased to 2.07 million bpd in April from 2.02 million bpd in March, and rose by 11 percent from April 2017, Platts reported on Thursday, citing estimates by Nigeria's oil ministry.
Since militant violence in the Niger Delta abated in the second half of last year, Nigeria has gradually ramped up production, but its oil and condensate output dipped in March, due to what officials attributed to illegal tapping of pipelines in the oil-producing region.
A spokesman for the oil ministry told Platts that Nigeria was on track to achieve its oil and condensate production target of 2.3 million bpd, set as an assumption in its 2018 budget.
Nigeria was initially exempt from the OPEC production cuts together with Libya because of the violence in the two countries that had substantially reduced their oil production. At the meeting at which OPEC extended the pact until the end of 2018, Libya and Nigeria agreed to stick to an unofficial collective cap of 2.8 million bpd of crude oil production, reflecting the presumed sustained production capacities of 1 million bpd for Libya and 1.80 million bpd for Nigeria.
According to OPEC's secondary sources in the latest Monthly Oil Market Report, Nigeria's crude oil production in March was 1.810 million bpd, up by 18,200 bpd from February.
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According to the monthly survey of one of those secondary sources, S&P Global Platts, Nigerian crude oil production dropped by 40,000 bpd in April compared to March, due to an outage of the Trans Forcados Pipeline that affected exports of its Forcados grade. Platts sources say that Nigeria's crude oil production is likely to drop again in May because the Qua Iboe grade may be shut in for scheduled maintenance.
The Platts survey found that Nigeria's crude oil production dropped to 1.88 million bpd in April from 1.92 million bpd in March.
OPEC will release on Monday, May 14, the next oil market report with data for April, and the secondary sources is what OPEC uses to measure compliance to the deal.
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