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.
Source:Punch Newspaper
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