Fires that broke out along two pipelines in the southern Nigerian state of Delta on Tuesday were most likely caused by an attack rather than attempted oil theft, the state oil company said on Thursday.
The suspected attack came just one week after unknown gunmen attacked two Royal Dutch Shell pipelines in neighbouring Rivers state, killing 11 people and cutting output by 180,000 barrels per day (bpd). "It was a wilful act of destruction," said Levi Ajuonuma, spokesman for the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), in the first official comments on the cause of the fires in Delta.
Asked whether NNPC suspected an attempt at stealing from the pipelines -- a common problem in the Niger Delta -- or a deliberate attack, he said: "We are looking at it as an attack."
Delta and Rivers are both in the Niger Delta, which accounts for almost all of Nigeria's 2.4 million bpd crude output.
Most of the delta's estimated 20 million inhabitants live in poverty and feel cheated of the wealth generated by the oil industry. This fuels militancy, sabotage, kidnappings, oil theft and conflicts between communities.
Ajuonuma said the situation at the Delta pipelines was now under control and there was no disruption to supply of petroleum products from the Warri refinery in Delta to northern Nigeria, or of crude oil to the Kaduna refinery in the north.
The pipelines are operated by the Pipelines and Product Marketing Company (PPMC), an arm of the NNPC, which is keen to avoid panic-buying of fuel in northern Nigeria.
The pipeline fires broke out in a remote location in a mangrove forest about 2 kilometres from Adeje community, itself about 10 kilometres from Warri, the oil hub of Delta state.
A Reuters witness at the scene said the pipelines were buried in the ground and the suspected attackers appeared to have excavated them in several places and blown them up.
The forest was scorched on an area at least 100 metres wide around one of the craters, where jagged metal was visible in the blackened soil.
Two uniformed policemen at the site said two dead bodies had been found earlier on Thursday, although a police spokeswoman in Warri said she had no information about this.
Ajuonuma, who did not mention any casualties, said authorities were appealing to local communities to help the government prevent similar attacks.
President Olusegun Obasanjo ordered security forces in the delta to be on high alert after the Shell attacks in Rivers last week. Shell has now resumed production there and the shortfall is just 15,000 bpd.