ABUJA (AFP) — Nigerian President Umaru Yar'Adua on Thursday urged a gathering of transparency experts here to look at ways of cracking down on "blood oil", or crude stolen from conflict zones.
"The Nigerian experience shows that there is a sense in which we can talk of blood oil ...," Yar'Adua said in a speech read by his deputy Goodluck Jonathan.
"It is my hope that this conference will seriously interrogate this issue and explore the possibility of chemically marking oil stolen from conflict areas and laundered in the international market."
The speech came at the opening of the first West African Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) conference.
Yar'Adua used the term "blood oil" to refer to oil stolen from zones such as the Niger Delta, likening the situation to the trade in "blood diamonds" that fuelled bloody civil wars in West African neighbours Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Just as the Kimberley process brought in a certification system for legally mined diamonds, the Nigerian president asked the conference to look at ways of "fingerprinting" oil to enable authorities to distinguish what is legally pumped from what is stolen and illegally sold.
The technology to distinguish between different types of oil exists already, industry sources say.
Nigeria, Africa's second-largest crude producer, is estimated to lose some 80,000 barrels of crude per day to large-scale theft, much of it organised by influential politicians.
The West African country produces on average 2.1 million barrels of oil per day.
Assisi Asobie, head of EITI's Nigeria chapter, said the first ever West African conference is being attended by about 120 transparency experts, including 15 from Africa.
He said the aim of the conference is to allow the under a dozen west African countries implementing EITI to share their experiences about transparency in governance of resources.
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