According to NNPC, the Port Harcourt Refinery has begun operations.
After extensive renovation, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC Ltd) announced on Tuesday that the Port Harcourt refinery has resumed production.
According to NNPC Ltd, on Tuesday, November 26, the refinery started loading petroleum products onto trucks.
This was revealed Tuesday morning by Olufemi Soneye, the company’s chief corporate communications officer, in a post on his X handle.
“Today, Tuesday, truck loading begins at the Port Harcourt Refinery; production begins,” Mr. Soneye stated.
The PortHarcourt Refineries are made up of two units: the new facility can refine 150,000 barrels per day (bpd), while the old plant can refine 60,000 bpd. Together, these two units can refine 210,000 bpd.
After oil giant Eni was chosen as a technical adviser and the government hired Italy’s Maire Tecnimont to conduct an evaluation of the refinery complex, the refinery was shut down for the first phase of repairs in March 2019. Following the Federal Executive Council’s (FEC) approval of $1.5 billion for the project, NNPC Ltd announced in 2021 that repairs had begun at PHRC.
The refinery’s flare start-off and mechanical completion were declared by the Nigerian government on December 21, 2023.
Context
Four refineries are owned by Nigeria; two are in Port Harcourt, while the other two are in Warri and Kaduna. However, in spite of Turn-Around-Maintenance (TAM) efforts, the refineries have been in decline for a number of years.For many years, Nigeria was forced to rely entirely on the importation of petroleum products for domestic consumption due to the depreciating condition of its local refineries, which significantly depleted the country’s foreign reserves.
Reviving the country’s refineries to lessen reliance on gasoline imports has been a goal of several administrations for decades, but they have failed.
Former President Muhammadu Buhari promised in 2015 to increase foreign reserves by halting the importation of refined fuel and to bring the nation’s underperforming refineries back to full capacity.The Buhari administration set December 2019 as the deadline in November 2018, the date by which three refineries must reach full output capacity in order to stop the nation’s imports of petroleum. The deadline was moved to 2020 later in the month. The government spent N10.23 billion in June 2020 on three refineries that processed zero crude, despite the fact that the 2020 deadline was not met.
The federal government spent more than N11 trillion on refinery rehabilitation between 2010 and 2023, according to a May 2023 report by the House of Representatives ad hoc committee on the nation’s refinery situation.
After multiple unsuccessful attempts, the President Bola Tinubu administration promised in August 2023 that the PHRC would be operational by December. They stated that Warri would be operational by the end of the first quarter of 2024, and Kaduna would follow suit towards the end of 2024. But at the time, the deadlines weren’t fulfilled. The presidency declared on Monday that preparations are now in progress to fully privatize Nigeria’s state-owned refineries.
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