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.
