Government recently held a major conference and promised that its first crude oilconsignment from Nigeria would arrive on Wednesday, October 7. 750,000 barrels of crude oil was the amount expected.

But, the Statesman can report that the chattered vessel sent to Nigeria tolift the crude oil left Nigerian waters empty last Thursday for Ghana.

It arrived in Tema empty after being chased out of Nigerian territorial waters by the Nigerian Navy. according to our sources in Nigeria. The reason a Nigerian Navy source gave was that the ship had no legal order to load in the WEst African country.

An earlier report that reached The Statesman indicated that while the vessel docked in Nigeria for weeks waiting to lift the supposedly clinched crude consignment to Ghana, it was incurring port charges and bunkering/operational costs, etc. It is estimated that this whole futile adventure has cost the people of Ghana some $1,000,000 for both chatter cost and waiting charges at the Nigerian port.

The Nigerians, like the Indian government, are very unhappy with the Ghanaian government. The Mills administration, which has a manifesto pledge to stop Nigerian company Sahara Oil from lifting crude to Ghana has stubbornly refused to rescind on that decision while expecting Nigeria to be sympathetic to its oil woes, even though Ghana had reneged on earlier oil deals with its neighbour.

President Mills recently went to Venezuela, after the UN General Assembly ostensibly to look for alternative supply sources. But, sources say nothing was achieved there since the government went there with no programme of clarity. Promises of crude oil from Libyatoo have turned out to be empty barrels.

Meanwhile Will Connors of the Wall Street Journal reports that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries Secretary General Abdalla Salem El-Badri said Friday that current high oil prices weren't due to lack of supply but to speculators, and said OPEC wouldn't intervene or push extra supply into the market.

"If we see the price is going up because of a shortage of crude oil in the oil market, I'm sure OPEC would intervene and correct this," El-Badri told Dow Jones Newswires said in an interview in Abuja, Nigeria after two days of meetings with his Nigerian counterparts. "But what we are seeing at this time is not a shortage in the oil market."

El-Badri instead placed most of the blame for rising oil prices on speculation.

"Speculation must be prevented from going wild as it happened in 2008, something must be done," he said. "You cannot really eliminate speculation, but you can control them somehow, not to go wild. It's not me who controls the markets, its the regulators. They should control it somehow.

"When we see that the price is following the economy, then we will be very happy," he said. "It has nothing to do with the shortage in the oil market."

To emphasize this, El-Badri said OPEC currently supplying at 1.7 million barrels of oil above the five year average, and has "floating storage of 125 million [barrels], 55 million of which is crude [oil] and 75 million [barrels] of which is product."

When asked if concerns about the environment would impact future demand for oil in the lead-up to the Copenhagen Summit, El-Badri didn't say.

"In Copenhagen we would like to see a win-win situation," he said. "We all would like to see a reduction in emissions. We all want to work towards an energy supply for the longer term, for developing and developed countries alike.

"The motivation should not go on the shoulder of some countries and not other countries," he said.

"If we are going to have a win-win situation, the Kyoto Protocol and the convention should be the base for any improvement," he said. "We are only 12 countries [in OPEC]. If you don't have a win-win situation for everybody then you are in crisis, and you will not have an agreement.

"The Kyoto Protocol, nobody really implemented it, and it should be implemented," he said. "We should not go to Copenhagen without an agreement."