By Fejiro Oliver
For over a decade, Sterling Oil Exploration & Energy Production Company Ltd (SEEPCO) told Nigerian regulators it was producing a modest 12,000 to 25,000 barrels of Okwuibome crude a day. A SecretsReporters field investigation, cross-checked against NEITI’s own disclosures, puts the real number at between 320,000 and 400,000 barrels a day, more than ten times what the company, now chaired by Anthony Chukwueke, has ever declared.
SEEPCO’s crude comes from Okwuibome, a field it inherited from Shell (SPDC) with five original wells. Our reporters traced how that number quietly grew to at least 41 active wells, spread across a cluster the company internally refers to as the Beneku wells: 20 wells at Beneku A, 5 at Beneku B, 4 at Beneku F, 5 at Beneku E, 2 at Beneku G, 2 at Beneku H, and a further well near Okwuibome at Umu-Ugbome. Every one of these wells is producing crude daily, feeding storage tanks at the company’s yard in Kwale – volumes that never show up in what SEEPCO reports to Abuja.
The numbers that do not add up
SEEPCO officially began production at Okwuibome in 2011, declaring 12,000 barrels a day, a figure it later revised upward to 25,000 barrels a day in 2015. Nigeria’s Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), in response to a Freedom of Information request, disclosed that the total volume SEEPCO reported lifting between 2011 and 2020 was 68,114,813 barrels as against a total of 78,977,298 barrels NEITI itself recorded as lifted from the field in the same window, a gap of nearly 11 million barrels that nobody in government has explained.
The inconsistencies run deeper than that single gap. In 2014, NEITI’s own records show no figure at all for the actual volume of oil lifted by SEEPCO yet the company still paid $61.7 million that year in royalties. A royalty is, by definition, a percentage of what was actually produced; paying one while declaring no production volume is not an accounting quirk, it is a red flag. In 2017, SEEPCO paid royalty on just 3,110,000 barrels while simultaneously declaring $170,539,820 in sales value for the year and again with no verifiable production figure behind either number.
By 2018, NEITI’s own report shows SEEPCO’s declared production at 12,796,000 barrels for the year, equivalent to just 1.83 percent of its production sharing quota. In 2019, the company paid nothing at all in Petroleum Profit Tax while claiming to have lifted 1,920.25 (in NEITI’s stated unit) barrels and paying just $115,110.46 in royalty. Government auditors were left to take the company’s own arithmetic on faith, because there was no independent instrument anywhere along the export chain to check it against.
The barges nobody is allowed to inspect
Our investigation identified the mechanism that makes the volume gap possible: a fleet of specially built barges, each with a 33,000-barrel capacity, operated through a company SEEPCO itself set up, Yade Barge Operators Limited. Roughly ten of these barges move in convoys behind a tug boat, every night, including public holidays, ferrying crude along the creeks from Kwale to Agge in Bayelsa State. Each barge is loaded overnight directly from a pipeline connecting SEEPCO’s storage tanks to the river bank inside the company’s own yard with no independently verifiable oil meter recording what goes in. A community leader at Agge told our investigation that since SEEPCO began evacuating crude through the area in 2011, no DPR or NNPC official has ever visited the facility or the community, even though the area is now heavily militarized.
Put together, our investigation’s most conservative estimate places SEEPCO’s true crude lifting between 2011 and 2021 at approximately 1,168,000,000 barrels; an average of 116.8 million barrels a year against the 68,114,813 barrels the company has officially declared for roughly the same window. Using a conservative benchmark price of $50 a barrel, that undeclared volume alone is worth well over $6 billion in crude the Nigerian treasury has never been able to properly account for; other data our reporters reviewed puts the true figure of undeclared value, once royalties, Petroleum Profit Tax and Nigeria’s production-sharing entitlement are all factored in, as high as $10 billion.
The SEEPCO report is part of an ongoing investigation into the company’s corporate governance and crude oil lifting in the Nigeria Delta
