Loading terminals operating without meters
By Tse Tse Tuk | The North Journals
Imagine a petrol station with many pumps but not a single meter to measure the quantities of fuel dispensed to motorists. The volume declared on any given day depends largely on the whims of the station manager, who must tell the pump attendants what figures to be recorded.
If the scenario seems improbable in organised economy, an industry-scale version of it is the norm in Nigeria’s petroleum sector, where oil terminals have no meters, leaving crude oil outputs open to debate and the vagaries of oil company executives sitting in far-away London, New York, Zurich, or Geneva.
Across the country’s 36 crude oil export terminals, at least sixteen still operate without functional meters, while many of the rest rely on “faux meters” crude contraptions manually assembled by the very oil companies being regulated. The system is as opaque as the product it measures.
A Global Double Standard
Oil majors such as Shell, Chevron, Agip, and ExxonMobil use digital multiphase meters in Norway, Angola, Canada, and Mexico capable of reading flow, density, and composition to the last drop. But in Nigeria, they rely on dipsticks, analog gauges, and faith.
At the Escravos, Forcados, Bonny, Brass, and Qua Iboe terminals Nigeria’s largest onshore facilities the metering infrastructure is either nonexistent or outdated. Offshore floating production vessels such as Bonga, Agbami, ERHA, Akpo, and Usan fare no better, depending largely on internal company instruments.
“The truth is, Nigeria’s production figures are whatever the oil majors say they are,” a retired regulator told The North Journals in Abuja. “Government has no independent means to verify the numbers.”
Oil Without Meters, Money Without Trace
The Nigeria Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) successor to the defunct DPR insists it can track vessel movements from its offices in Lagos and Abuja. But insiders dismiss this claim as fiction.
“They don’t monitor the wells, they don’t control the terminals,” said an oilfield engineer who once worked at Forcados. “They receive company data sheets. That’s their ‘monitoring.’”
This vacuum enables both corporate manipulation and theft. Without continuous metering, crude can be siphoned off between wellheads and terminals or during vessel loading with no alarms raised.
The NEITI Warning That Went Unheeded
In 2015, the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) sounded the alarm: between 2012 and 2015, 107 million barrels of crude worth $9.89 billion were unaccounted for due to poor metering and theft.
The report was damning, concluding that Nigeria loses more than 250,000 barrels daily to untracked leakages worth over $25 million a day. But neither the Buhari nor Tinubu administrations implemented NEITI’s recommendations to install certified multiphase meters at all wellheads and export points.
Ten years on, the picture remains grim. While regulators boast of “improvements,” independent analysts argue that the numbers simply don’t add up.
NUPRC’s Bright Figures, Dark Shadows
By July 2025, NUPRC announced a victory headline: crude losses down to 9,600 barrels per day, the lowest in 16 years. The Commission credited new surveillance, data audits, and the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA 2021) for the improvement.
But a North Journal review of production data shows that losses may have merely shifted from visible theft to statistical blind spots misreported output, unverified export volumes, and offshore leakages masked as “technical adjustments.”
In the same period, reports from BusinessDay and Ripples Nigeria estimated that Nigeria lost a cumulative ₦8.41 trillion between 2021 and mid-2025 from metering lapses and theft combined. The NUPRC swiftly rejected the figure, calling it “inaccurate and misleading.”
Yet, NEITI’s latest 2025 audit quietly notes “persistent inconsistencies in terminal reconciliation,” suggesting that the so-called recovery might be a mirage.
The System That Protects Itself
How did a country producing 2 million barrels per day allow such a vacuum?
Because the system, political, bureaucratic, and commercial benefits from ambiguity.
NUPRC’s field logistics are often funded by the same oil companies it oversees. The regulator’s data systems depend on company feeds. Its inspectors travel in company-chartered boats. “When your watchdog eats from the same bowl as the thief,” said one NEITI official, “you can’t expect barking.”
And so, when figures don’t reconcile, government blames “pipeline vandalism” or “technical downtime.” Meanwhile, vessels sail out nightly from Bonny and Forcados, some loaded beyond declared tonnage bound for Europe and Asia.
The Phantom Oil Economy
Oil theft has long been described as Nigeria’s parallel economy, one running side-by-side with official exports.
In 2023, NNPC Limited’s Chief Financial Officer, Umar Ajiya, claimed Nigeria was losing $150 million daily through theft and sabotage. But industry insiders argue the real losses occur not in vandalised pipelines but in unmetered terminals.
“When you don’t measure, you can’t manage,” said an engineer at an FPSO off the Niger Delta coast. “And when you can’t manage, someone else does offshore, unseen.”
The Reform That Never Comes
NEITI has repeatedly urged government to enforce full metering across the upstream chain from wellhead to export terminal with independent verification by third-party inspectors. But successive administrations have ignored the call, preferring “company cooperation” over confrontation.
The Petroleum Industry Act was meant to fix this, yet implementation remains slow and politicized. Even the 2025 fiscal audits still rely on figures provided by the operators themselves.
Without meters, there is no truth. And without truth, Nigeria’s crude remains a ghost in the books and gold in someone else’s pocket.
Rewriting the Power Map
If this were any other country, there would be meter reviews, forensic audits, and criminal probes. But in Nigeria, the institutions themselves are tools of concealment.
It took NEITI’s independent audit to expose just how deeply rotten the system was yet successive governments let the rot continue. Only now, under heavy pressure and new legislation, has the regulator begun to tighten the screws.
Still, no terminal, no well, and no pipeline is truly verifiable. The story remains: phantom oil, phantom terminals, phantom numbers. The biggest leak in Nigeria’s fiscal system is not a pipeline puncture, it’s the meter that never exists. For a country tied to crude earnings, that absence is a catastrophe.
