Nigeria's booming illegal oil refineries- A BBC Exclusive Report

The vegetation ended abruptly and the colour of the landscape turned from green to black. I was getting a rare look at the booming trade in refined stolen crude oil in southern Nigeria. 

"Here is our business place," a man, who did not want to give his real name but asked to be called Edward, told me as we walked around a remote, heavily polluted palm-tree fringed creek in Ogoniland in the Niger Delta.



"We use these to go and collect our natural resources - our crude oil," he said, pointing to a locally carved boat lying on its side.

In the middle of the night, to avoid detection, they break into the multinational oil companies' pipelines and help themselves.

We settle with the army people. If they see money in your hand they will take that” Edward Illegal oil dealer

Dotted along the creek were dozens of large drums used for boiling up the crude oil. 

They had pipes protruding from them leading to troughs into which the products are collected; kerosene and petrol for the local market and diesel which is taken away on barges or inland on trucks by traders.

Next to each home-made refinery are pits full of bitumen which is sold to road construction companies.
"Almost 400 people work here and every night we produce around 11,000 litres of diesel," said 32-year-old Edward, adding that his elder brothers had learnt all about the business in Bakassi, near the Cameroonian border with Nigeria.

Fatalities The work is dangerous.
They have to be extremely careful to ensure the waste product - gas - does not ignite and cause an inferno.

"It is so dangerous but there is nothing else we can do in order to make a living," said a 25-year-old man who asked me to call him Andy.

"Many of our brothers have died and are injured. We also get diseases from it and get rashes on the body."
I was told the last fatality was in 2011.

The military is supposed to be stopping all this and some operations have been disrupted but the effort is seriously hampered by the desire to get in on the action.

"We settle with the army people. If they see money in your hand they will take that," Edward said.
"If not they will take products from you. If we have 10 drums we will give them two," he said, adding, "It's very normal."

Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala told the London Financial Times recently that the trade in stolen crude had led to a 17% drop in official oil sales in April - equivalent to around 400,000 barrels a day.
That is a whopping $1.2bn (£772m) lost in a month. This includes oil that was not stolen but stayed underground as a result of shut downs due to break-ins.

Shell puts this figure for the entire Niger Delta at around 150,000 barrels per day.

The huge discrepancy is a sign of how difficult it is to get the facts in the murky world of Nigerian oil.
Oil theft is not new here. Before the 2009 amnesty that pacified the Niger Delta, militants used to break into the pipelines to get money to buy weapons.

The peace has enabled the oil companies to significantly increase their oil production - which means much more money for the government.

So for now the oil theft might be seen as a relatively minor irritant.

'False pipes' But how wise is it to allow lawlessness to continue in an already neglected, fragile region of Nigeria so critical to the nation's economy?

Courtesy of: BBC