NIGERIAN NATIONAL PETROLEUM CORPORATION NNPC DEPLOYS DRONES TO PROTECT PIPELINES

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has said it will begin it's deployment of drones this weekend towards the protection and eradication of pipeline vandalism in Nigeria. This replaces the online monitoring group with the Nigerian Army. The Group Managing Director, Dr Ibe Kaichukwu during a visit to the Kaduna Refinery said that staff of NNPC and officers of the Nigerian army connived with other influential members of society to sabotage the process.He called for constant redeployment of  all depots staff, constantly changing personnel at strategic units as well as encouraging the military to all also do same.
He further explained that they will support in funding the army corps engineers as they are main contractors.He said: “I have a lot of energy around this, we are looking at tracking devices, and we are looking at monitoring devices. We are holding a lot of screening right now. Even on drones and total pictures. Nigerians are very resilient because the moment they know where you’re headed, the amount of proposals I’m getting you’ll think I’m building drones in every backyard, and I’m quite impressed with that. But we really need to throw technology on them, but again we need to find out the cost of the technology.
“But we can’t do it alone with the Army; we have to realize that there are communities; we have to create incentives to the communities to own these pipelines and realize that it is important for them to be there. This comes down to the Corporate social responsibility CSR. What are the things that we can do to ensure that the people along the pipelines, who suffer from obvious exposures by virtue of their location in those areas see a sense of reward by virtue of being there?