Exxon Mobil Corp.’s Nigerian unit said armed men attacked a supply vessel near its oil facilities offshore the southern state of Akwa Ibom yesterday.
“Operation is normal, and production has not been impacted,” Ozemoya Okordion, a spokesman based in Lagos, the commercial capital, said today in an e-mailed statement. “The incident has been reported to security and relevant government agencies.”
Gunmen on Sept. 30 attacked a vessel supplying one of Exxon’s offshore oil platforms, wounding one worker and seizing another. There’s “no update on the incident,” Okordion said.
Violence has risen in the southern Niger River delta, home to Nigeria’s oil and gas industry, after a period of relative quiet that followed a government amnesty in 2009 and the disarming of thousands of fighters. Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil producer and fifth-biggest source of U.S. oil imports.
Armed attacks in the delta cut Nigeria’s oil output more than 28 percent from 2006 to 2009, data compiled by Bloomberg shows. Royal Dutch Shell Plc said on Sept. 26 it shut 25,000 barrels a day of crude output from its Imo River field in the country’s southern Abia state because of the level of theft.