Oil-servicing companies in Nigeria's violent delta region are having to shoulder rising security costs or consider walking away from essential engineering and drilling work with oil and gas multinationals. Security analysts say militant attacks on facilities in the world's eighth-largest oil exporter -- which have shut down a quarter of Nigeria's output -- followed by a wave of kidnappings of expatriate oil workers have intensified efforts by multinationals to shift the burden of risk to their service contractors. Even the smaller servicing companies face increased annual costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for security.
See "Worker Security Costly in Nigeria", Dino Mahtani, Los Angeles Times, September 24, 2006