The Port Harcourt Refining Company Limited will
start refining crude oil and will contribute to
petroleum product availability by the end of this
month, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation
has said.
It also assured that on or before the end of this week,
the scarcity of Premium Motor Spirit, otherwise
known as petrol, will cease across the country.
The Group Managing Director, NNPC, Dr. Joseph
Dawha, disclosed this in Abuja on Thursday after
inspecting some petrol stations in the city.
He said, “Presently, the refineries are undergoing
rehabilitation and we are undertaking what we call a
new strategy to carry out the turn around
maintenance on them. Basically, what this means is
that we are carrying out phased implementation of
rehabilitation of the refineries.
“We are taking the refineries unit by unit and carrying
out turnaround maintenance on them. So in other
words, the maintenance are being carried out on the
run and we started a couple of months ago.
“Most of the refineries have advanced to a certain
stage where they will be able to operate very soon.
For example, the Port Harcourt refinery, which has
reached an advanced stage, will start receiving crude
by end of this month and then of course will start
contributing to the available products in the country.”
NNPC has four refineries, two in Port Harcourt, and
one each in Kaduna and Warri. The refineries have a
combined installed capacity of 445,000 barrels per
day. A comprehensive network of pipelines and
depots strategically located throughout Nigeria link
these refineries.
Dawha said the maintenance exercise on the
refineries were spontaneously taking place in all the
facilities.
He said, “At the end of the target 18 months, most of
the refineries would have been rehabilitated to such
level where they can actually process crude optimally
to make contributions to the availability of products
in the country.
“I’ve heard some people say we have neglected the
refineries, no, farther from that. We hope that at the
end of the exercise, these refineries will be fully back
into operation and we will minimise some of the
problems we have with importation.”
He explained that why the refineries were not
running was a conscious decision, adding that “we
decided that if the refineries were not in good state
to process crude for maximum gain, then there was
no point sending crude to the refineries.
“Therefore what you do is to try and fix it so that by
the time you start processing the crude, you will get
real value for the crude you are sending to the
refineries. We are satisfied with the level of work that
has been carried out so far in the Port Harcourt
refinery, so that if you start processing crude now
you will get real value.”
The Managing Director, Pipelines Product Marketing
Company, Mr. Haruna Momoh, stated that the NNPC
imports 50 per cent of petroleum products into the
country.
He noted that when the ongoing rehabilitation and
turn around maintenance of the Port Harcourt
refinery is completed in July, 2015, the plant would
run at 80 per cent installed capacity and produce five
million litres of petrol on a daily basis.
Meanwhile, Dawha called on marketers to start
importing PMS, stressing that the distribution
challenge of PMS was largely due to the non-
involvement of marketers, a development which
resulted in the scarcity nationwide.
The NNPC GMD said as of Thursday, the PPMC had a
stock level of 1.1 billion litres, representing 27 days
sufficiency, and noted that the stock excludes
volumes with confirmed delivery dates within the
next couple of days.
“In the last five days, we have brought into Abuja 428
trucks of Premium Motor Spirit, averaging 85 trucks
daily, to address the petrol requirement in Abuja and
its immediate environs,” Dawha added.