The Nigerian Navy has arrested 14 suspects involved in oil theft and also uncovered an illegal oil refining site with a capacity to produce over 9.6 million litres of Automotive Gas Oil(AGO) per day in creeks around Elem Krakama, in Degema Local Council of Rivers State.
The Navy, in an exercise conducted by the Nigerian Navy Ship (NNS) Pathfinder, yesterday, seized four wooden boats with a storage capacity of 7,000 metric tonnes, while siphoning crude from a tapped oil wellhead owned by the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL).Â
Commander of NNS Pathfinder, Commodore Desmond Igbo, while conducting journalists on a tour of the location where the illegal activity was done on a wide scale, identified the oil field as Oil Mining Lease (OML) 18, owned by NNPCL and the wellhead badly compromised by the suspected oil thieves.
Igbo, who expressed shock at the wide-scale economic sabotage going on in the location, noted that the site has 16 cooking pots with a capacity of 6,000 litres of AGO each while maintaining that the navy will not relent in ensuring that illegal oil refining activities become a thing of the past. Â
Igbo, in an interview, said: “This is Elem Krakama, in Degema Council of Rivers State. We have come here to ensure that this oil stealing will not continue.Â
“We have about 16 cooking pots, and some of them contain about 600, 000 litres. It is quite huge. You can see where they are tapping it, right from the oil wellhead.
