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Shell warns of attack threat to oil field
28/04/2003 12:17 - (SA)
Lagos - Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell said on Monday it was taking steps to defend a major offshore oil storage and export facility lying off Nigeria's Niger Delta from a threatened attack by armed militants.
Shell said that it had credible evidence that "criminal elements" had begun making preparations to destroy the Sea Eagle, a mammoth floating oil station designed to process 170 000 barrels of crude oil per day.
For two months spradic unrest in western Niger Delta has disrupted oil production in Nigeria. At its height the trouble cut off more than 40% of the country's exports, but offshore facilities were spared.
In addition to being Africa's biggest oil producer, Nigeria is the world's sixth most important exporter, with an OPEC quota of more than two million barrels per day, much of it destined for the United States.
On Sunday, Shell took out a full-page advertisement in the Nigerian press to warn militants that the firm was aware of their alleged plans to attack the facility.
"The advert is a strategy to tell them that we are aware of the threat and we have taken stern security measures to forestall it," a Shell spokesperson, who asked not to be named, said on Monday.
The Sea Eagle, one of a new generation of floating oil terminals known as Floating, Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessels, can hold 1.4 million barrels of crude.
If it is sunk, it could provoke an environmental calamity.
"Information reaching us reveals that anytime from now, the vessel could be boarded by force of arms and set on fire," the Shell statement said.
"Well meaning community contacts reveal that, as part of these plans, drums of petrol have been acquired, awaiting the signal to attack," it said.
An uprising in March by ethnic Ijaw militants sent tremors through an international oil market already on edge over the war in Iraq, and caused Nigeria to send hundreds of troops into the Delta.
Eight military servicemen, five oil workers and possibly scores of villagers were killed in the clashes, after Ijaw communities rebelled against their alleged political marginalisation.
Relative calm has returned to the area, and production by Shell and US major ChevronTexaco is progressively returning to normal. This week the firms said they were back at two-thirds capacity.
Two US warships - refitted 40m World War II patrol boats - have been donated to Nigeria by the Pentagon and were this week deployed to the western Delta to protect the oil industry.
The Shell spokesperson said the Sea Eagle's would-be attackers claim the firm has not employed enough local labour on the Sea Eagle, but insisted that an agreement had been reached with moderate community leaders.
"It has nothing to do with Ijaw militants. It is about some people in nine comunities that are not patient enough for a full implementation of a memorandum of understanding," he said.
- AFX
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