COVID-19: NNPC GMD working tirelessly to ensure sufficient fuel supply – Wunti

The Group General Manager, National Petroleum Investment Management Services (NAPIMS), Mr. Bala Wunti, has said the focus of the Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Mr. Mele Kyari, presently is to ensure that Nigerians have sufficient supply of petrol despite the disruption in the country due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wunti said this during an interview on Channels Television on Thursday.

He noted that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was far-reaching. He explained that the virus which has continued to spread across the globe has affected activities generally across the world. Wunti said: “As you are aware, when this happened, it caught the world unprepared and what the world did in order to contain it was to trigger a kind of lockdown.

“That lockdown led to total shutdown of economies. It brought down the global economy to the level that was forecasted to be 10 per cent of global GDP and wages of $4 trillion has been taken away as a result of unemployment forecasted to be almost 100 million people who would have lost their jobs.

“And all these things are happening at the same time when demand has collapsed completely. Demand has come down by almost 20 per cent, from 100 million barrels to now around 80 million barrels.

“And while this is happening, production continues to grow. We have an oversupply and a decaying demand and the consequence of that obviously triggered a kind of intense struggle by the two largest producers – Russia and Saudi Arabia.

“That led to a price which brought us to where we are. We have seen a new trend in oil prices because of the oversupply, mopping up everything that has to do with storage. What that means is that the storage are getting filled quickly and very soon if nothing is that, we would get to a situation where there is nowhere to commodity.”

Owing to this development, Wunti said: “What is important is that we have to maintain our energy security. To achieve that we have to ensure that the entire country has sufficient fuel supply as well as ensure there is enough gas for the power plants, so that we can have power and oil.

“And, that is the pre-occupation of the GMD. When this happened, he was very decisive and he took an unprecedented step to make sure we have enough fuel.

“More equally, we are trying to reduce cost and also see the possibility of deferring some of the projects we anticipated in the near term.”