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Nigeria’s crude oil revenue looks set to decline as Royal Dutch Shell Plc halted crude shipments from the country’s Forcados export terminal amid falling oil production. Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Limited issued a notice of force majeure on Forcados shipments, effective from midday on Tuesday, and planned to issue a revised offtake programme in due course. More than 200,000 barrels per day of Nigerian crude normally pass through the terminal, according to the report. The shutdown comes just a month after Shell said it was restoring flows from the nearby Bonny facility. Force majeure is a clause that allows companies to skip contractual obligations following issues outside of their control. The stoppage occurred during replacement of one of the two single point moorings at Forcados, with the positioning of a jack-up barge preventing tanker access, export operations and resumption of full production into the terminal, Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited was quoted as saying in a notice. The presence of the jack-up offshore support vessel Seacor Strength at the Forcados moorings was confirmed by ship tracking data monitored by Bloomberg. According to the report, neither NNPC nor Shell gave an indication of the likely duration of the stoppage.
