Protesters have occupied an oil facility in Nigeria’s restive southern region, causing oil production cuts of 170,000 barrels per day in the latest disruption to hit Africa’s biggest producer, a spokesman for Royal Dutch Shell PLC said on Tuesday.
Precious Omuku said the company had started negotiations with the youths inside the facility in Ogoniland, in restive southern Nigeria. He did not give details on when the occupation began.
“We don’t know what their grievances are,” he said.
The attack is the latest incident in a series of bombings, kidnappings and protests that have slashed production by nearly 1 million barrels per day in Africa’s largest oil exporter, representing around one-third of its total capacity.
Omuku said that 137,000 barrels of the shut-down production belonged to a Shell subsidiary and the remaining 33,000 belonged to other parties that used Shell infrastructure.
Omuku said the protesters had taken over a manifold, which is an oil-pipeline intersection.
No oil has been pumped in Ogoniland since the region was gripped by widespread protests over exploitation and environmental degradation, leading to the execution of nine community leaders by Nigeria’s then-military government in 1995.
However, the tiny region, home to less than 500,000 of Nigeria’s 140 million citizens, is still crisscrossed with an aging network of pipelines carrying crude toward export terminals. Frequent oil spills in the region anger citizens and have sparked earlier protests.
Occupying oil facilities is a common form of protest in the volatile Niger Delta region, which remains deeply impoverished despite producing tens of billions in oil revenues every year.
Since no foreign oil company is currently active in Ogoniland, the region has not seen the kidnappings and attacks on foreign workers that have plagued production in much of the rest of the Delta region.
Around 100 foreign workers have been kidnapped since the beginning of the year and last week the region’s largest militant group bombed three pipelines leading to a major export terminal, helping send crude prices higher in world markets.
Nigeria is one of the world’s top 10 exporters of crude and a key source of oil imports for the United States.