BLP Oil & Gas Update Creative Doc.pdf April 2014 | Page 2

stolen crude oil is then refined in local “artisan” refineries and sold at local
black-markets as fuel or blended with refined products such as gasoline and
diesel.
The next level, in terms of sophistication and scale, is known as “bunkering”,
whereby a team use large hoses and taps to extract oil from the pipelines on
land, underground and even under water.
The oil is then pumped onto barges or boats in the Niger Delta that sail down
towards the coast where the oil is transferred to small tankers. While some
have managed to transport oil on these tankers to other storage facilities in
the Gulf of Guinea, they rarely sail due to their poor condition. Typically,
stolen oil builds up in the small tankers and is then transferred onto larger
tankers that transport the oil internationally.
The largest scale theft takes place at the oil export terminals and is known as
“topping up”. Some international tankers that connect to Nigeria’s oil
terminals to take legal deliveries of oil also take illegal volumes of oil at the
same time.
This theft can only be carried out with the collusion of people working at the
terminals. Given the vast volumes of oil involved, this form of theft is the most
economically damaging. This theft is enabled by oil terminals devoid of
formal metering systems, which makes it difficult to track how much oil the
terminals receive, where it is being sent and whether each transfer was a
legal or illegal volume.

Slipstream
Complex and opaque methods are used to move the oil internationally.
Tracking the stolen oil is likely to prove difficult and it is obviously possible that
the final recipient of this oil may have no idea that it is stolen.
Stolen Nigerian oil can be loaded with legitimately purchased oil from other
countries and then transported as a split cargo to the next stage in its
transportation. The split cargo can then be offloaded all at once to one
refinery or offloaded at different refineries. All or part of the split cargo could
be offloaded into storage, to another tanker, or to multiple tankers.
There is much speculation as to which countries eventually receive the oil.
Swiss trading companies have attracted suspicion for the role they may play