Presidential candidate of the Accord party, Gbenga Olawepo-Hashim, has unveiled what he described as the production backbone of his Energy First Presidential Agenda, promising to raise Nigeria’s crude oil production to a minimum of four million barrels per day within 24 months of an Accord administration.
Hashim made the declaration when he appeared on Channels Television’s Politics Today programme, where he outlined his strategy for using Nigeria’s existing petroleum assets to rapidly expand production.
At the centre of the plan, said Hashim, is an investment programme to bring approximately 3,000 currently non-producing oil wells back into productive operation.
‘We have oil wells that have already been drilled, assets that have already been discovered and infrastructure that have already been built. Our first task is to put these assets back to work for Nigeria,’ he said.
Hashim maintained that government should prioritise the recovery of existing productive assets over committing scarce public resources to projects like Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway, arguing that the road may not bring any revenue to government in the next 20 years.
The announcement comes against the backdrop of Nigeria’s current crude production of about 1.5 million barrels per day.
Moving from approximately 1.5 million to four million barrels daily would represent an increase of almost 2.5 million barrels per day, or more than 160 percent above current crude production.
The Accord presidential candidate argued that Nigeria’s fundamental problem is not the absence of petroleum resources, but the failure to convert existing resources and productive assets into reliable energy supply.
He said his administration would, therefore, make production recovery one of the first priorities of government.
The proposed programme would identify why each viable inactive well is not producing and deploy the necessary capital and technical interventions required to restore production. These interventions could include well workovers, well intervention, artificial lift systems, repairs to gathering infrastructure, pipeline rehabilitation, improved evacuation arrangements and other field-specific interventions.
For Hashim, the 3,000 wells are not merely dormant petroleum assets. They represent what he described as Nigeria’s wasted productive capacity.
‘The question is not how much oil Nigeria has underground. The question is why we are not producing the oil that our existing assets are capable of producing,’ he added.
He said an Accord administration would establish a National Production Recovery Dashboard to track every intervention, investment and additional barrel generated.