The Minister of State for Petroleum, Dr. Ibe
Kachikwu, has revealed that the United States of
America will soon resume their trade relationship
with Nigeria in the area of crude oil purchase.
He stated that the rekindled relationship was as a
result of President Muhammadu Buhari’s visit to the
US in July this year.
The Minister, however, did not reveal details of the
development but said the US had indicated its
interest in buying “very limited” quantities of
Nigeria’s crude.
Kachikwu while in Kaduna to inspect the level of
repair works on one of the country’s refineries, said
in spite of US renewed interest, Nigeria was bent
on extending its crude oil trading to Asia and other
parts of the world.
He said, “The fact of US actually being back into
the sales of crude market obviously will impact on
prices but what you find is that the volume of export
that US intends to do is really minimal because
there is a lot of local internal consumption and
strategically they are still reaching out to buy a
couple of Saudi barrels and in fact they are opening
up to buy a couple of Nigerian barrels.”
Kachikwu stated that following the president’s visit
in July, the US indicated interest in buying very
limited quantity of Nigerian oil, partly to support the
market.
He said the notion that the US stopped buying
Nigerian crude oil was wrong since three of the
major oil producing companies in Nigeria were US-
based and had up to 40 per cent share of Nigeria’s
production outputs.
“They never really stopped because they take their
own barrels of the share into their own refineries.
What we are talking of is the NNPC’s portion of the
crude which is about 60 or 55 per cent depending
on the share of others. That is the element we are
talking of whether they will continue to buy.
“Now when you take about one million barrels, out
of that 445,000 is local intervention crude, so really
what you are talking of is about 550,000 barrels.
It’s not a lot of product in terms of the NNPC
portion,” Kachikwu said.
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