The Nigerian government plans to revoke Royal Dutch Shell PLC’s oil operating license in the restive Ogoni region of the Niger Delta, said a Nigerian official visiting The Hague on said Friday.
“We are going to revoke Shell’s license to operate in Ogoniland,” Bamibele Ogedenjbe told Dow Jones Newswires.
Ogedenjbe is assistant director at the Nigerian department of petroleum resources, which oversees permitting of the country’s hydrocarbon licenses.
Bamibele was speaking on the sidelines of an oil industry conference in the Netherlands.
Shell?s spokesperson in London, Eurwen Thomas, said that the company was “aware the Nigerian government has been reviewing licenses ahead of the next bidding round, but no final decisions have been reached”.
Representatives of the Nigerian government could not be reached to comment.
Shell ceased oil production in the region in 1993, amid growing conflict between the national government and the local Ogoni people opposed to what they saw as environmental and economic exploitation.
The Nigerian government hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa, the writer and leader of the opposition movement, in 1995. Saro-Wiwa espoused non-violent opposition.
Since then, Shell has had periodic problems with vandalism to capped wells and unexplained breaks in pipelines that cross the region.
Ogedenjbe said Nigeria, Africa’s biggest oil producer, was producing between 2.3m and 2.4m barrels a day and had about 700 000 barrels a day out of service.