LAGOS (AFP) — Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell declared Friday force majeure on 225,000 barrels per day for June and July deliveries from its offshore Bonga oilfield in Nigeria, following an attack by militants.
Force majeure is a legal clause allowing producers to miss contracted deliveries because of circumstances beyond their control.
Thursday's attack was carried out by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) -- the best equipped and most organised of the armed groups operating in the Niger Delta.
It forced Shell to halt production on the site.
Bonga lies 120 kilometres (75 miles) offshore and has a daily output capacity of 200,000 barrels of oil and 150 million standard cubic feet of gas.
Shell started production at Bonga in November 2005. By May 2007, 100 million barrels of oil had already been exported from Bonga.
The Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) facility is one of the world's biggest.
Shell has a 55 percent interest in Bonga while US giant Exxon Mobil has 20 per cent, the Italian Agip 12.5 per cent and Elf Petroleum Nigeria, part of the French Total group, 12.5 per cent.
The attack was the latest in a series targeting Shell, which last week said it would not be able to honour June and July contracts from its Bonny terminal after MEND sabotaged key crude supply pipelines.
Shell had already declared a force majeure clause in contracts for April and May deliveries from Bonny following the attack.
The company has been the target of several recent attacks.
Thursday's attack on Bonga set alarm bells ringing in oil circles as such facilities had been previously considered out of the reach of the armed groups who stage regular raids on installations closer to shore.
It caused embarrassment in government circles, prompting the House of Representatives to summon security chiefs and key oil figures, both from government and corporations, to an emergency meeting next week, industry sources said Friday.
Among those invited to attend the meeting on Monday are the chief of defence staff, General Andrew Azazi, the country's oil minister, Odein Ajumogobia, top officials from all the oil majors operating in Nigeria and the head of the National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Lawal Yar'Adua, the sources said.
Violence in the southern Delta region has already reduced Nigeria's total oil production by a quarter since January 2006.
Nigeria was until recently Africa's largest oil producer but was overtaken in April by Angola, according to Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) figures.
Angola produced 1.873 million bpd on average in April, trumping the 1.818 million bpd produced by Nigeria.
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