The Back Story

Brass is an island in Bayelsa State that began as a fishing village. At a time, the town was the main port of the Nembe Kingdom, prompting a historian to call it the “the Venice of the Niger Delta”.

Blessed with beautiful Atlantic Ocean beaches, it has a coastline of approximately 90 km and lies at the mouth of the Brass River, a major inland waterway.

The Nigeria Agip Oil Company - a subsidiary of the Italian multinational group ENI - was established in 1962. The company discovered some oil fields a few years later. By the early 70s, it started production.

In 1972, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation acquired a stake in the company. NAOC’s Brass River terminal, about 100km west of Port Harcourt, was inaugurated a year after. By February 2010, the terminal produced 37,300 barrels of oil per day and two million cubic meters of gas.

NAOC (also referred to in this article as Agip) operates in the land and swamp areas of the Niger Delta, and owns 20 per cent of a joint venture arrangement with NNPC (60%) and Oando (20%), with concessions lying within Baylesa, Delta, Imo and Rivers States.

NAOC’s production asset includes 11 flow stations, two plants and one export terminal. The flow stations and gas plants are connected to the terminal in Brass through a 460 km pipeline network. cannot compete with those who get their products for a fraction of the legitimate rate. These are the companies that employ labour and pay taxes; the loss is not just theirs but extends to the country’s coffers.

The economic ramifications of the illegal bunkering going on the Niger Delta go beyond profits ending up in the wrong hands. The source of cooked AGO is crude stolen from vandalised pipelines. Invariably, any IOC running its operations on cooked AGO is indirectly sabotaging its own business, as well as denying the country billions of naira in revenue.

If there is no market for cooked AGO and other illegally refined products, there would be less incentive to vandalise pipelines.