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By Adewale Sanyaolu
Nigeria’s expectations of attaining self sufficiency in domestic refining capacity now hangs in the balance as the nation’s three refineries located in Port-Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna posted a combined capacity utilization of 23.53 percent last October, according to latest financial and operations reports from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation(NNPC).
The low score was coming even as Group Managing Director of NNPC, Dr. Maikanti Baru, assured Nigerians that the Corporation was targeting 60 percent local refining capacity in 2017.
Baru, stated this during a courtesy call on him by the Board and Management of Media Trust Limited, publishers of Daily Trust Newspapers, led by its Chairman, Mallam Kabiru Yusuf.
He explained that NNPC was keen on ending product importation in a few years and that concrete plans were on ground to achieve that.
“We are putting together various programmes to ensure that we achieve at least 60 percent local refining by the end of this year. It is the procedure or methodology that we are changing a little bit, we are focusing on the process licensors to come and audit our processes and they have already started auditing most of our process units in the various refineries.
“We hope if we do all these systematically, we should be able to get about 60 per cent level of capacity utilisation by the end of this year or at worst by the first quarter of 2018 and get to 80 per cent by the end of 2018, so that we could locally be able to supply half of our PMS requirements.
“Also, with other efforts in terms of other refineries coming in place, we should be able to quit importation in a few years,” the GMD stated.
The NNPC report revealed further that for the month of October 2016, the three refineries produced 251,925 metric tonnes of finished petroleum products and 137,776 metric tonnes of intermediate products out of 442,693 metric tonnes of crude processed at a combined capacity utilization of 23.53 percent compared to 13.89 percent combined capacity utilisation achieved in the month of September 2016.
The improved performance according to the Corporation was due to success achieved by the domestic refineries, adding that the three refineries processed the highest crude and operates at the highest capacity in recent year despite pipeline vandalism in the Niger Delta region; admitting that the three refineries continued to operate at minimal capacity.
