Shell resumes operations after militants’ attack

25.06.2008

Royal Dutch Shell on Tuesday resumed production at its deepwater Bonga field, which was shut down last week after an attack by militants.

The closure of the field, which had been pumping about 200,000 barrels per day of oil, had dampened hopes that a pledge by Saudi Arabia to boost production, during a meeting in Jeddah at the weekend, would tame spiralling oil prices.

But a spokesman for Shell in Lagos, Olav Ljosne, said the facility had resumed operations, though he declined to give a precise figure for how much it was producing on Tuesday.

“We are ramping up production towards the level where we were before the shut-down. We are getting back to normal,” Mr. Ljosne said.

The attack on the Bonga vessel, claimed by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), was the first of its kind on a deepwater facility, located more than 100 kilometres off Nigeria’s mangrove-lined coast.

The industry had hoped such facilities would prove immune to the kind of violence that shut in about 500,000 b/d of the country’s production in the Niger Delta in early 2006, which, at the time, represented about 20 per cent of the country’s output.