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Adewale Sanyaolu
The Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPRA),says it does not have a pricing template for petrol sourced locally.
General Manager, Operations, PPRA, Mr Soji Soloye, disclosed this at a retreat on ‘’Understanding the Dynamics of Downstream Sector of the Petroleum Industry’’ in Abuja.
He explained that the redundancy of the refineries was the major reason the actual price of petrol sourced from local refineries could not be determined.
He said when the refineries are functional; PPPRA would publish the price template for the price of locally produced petrol.
He equally disclosed that the government was currently working on a framework to determine the actual volume of fuel consumed in the country.
He said that Nigeria currently relies on petrol solely imported by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) as none of the country’s refineries was working currently.
In a related development, the agency has announced plans to release a Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), popularly called cooking gas, pricing template by mid 2020.
General Manager, Gas and Renewable Energy, PPRA, Mr. Olasupo Agbaje, said the agency was working with relevant stakeholders and operators in the sector to ensure the adoption of an acceptable template that would favour all relevant stakeholders.
According to him, the template will ensure fairness and drive competition in the industry.
“We are looking at middle of next year when we will come up with a good LPG pricing template that will serve all. You know that it is a fully deregulated sector.
We will come out with a template that everybody will access and will be able to question any operator that sells above what the template says,’’ he said
Commenting on the high cost of LPG, Agbaje blamed the cost on incessant pirate attacks on LPG bearing vessels and delay in LPG vessel movement.
He added that the removal of Value Added Tax (VAT), had initially brought down the price of LPG before the recent increase.
Agbaje noted that the LPG market was very sensitive and reacts sharply to any disruption in supply.
“The removal of VAT on locally-produced LPG had an immediate impact on the price of the commodity in the market.
There are many factors that account for pricing. When VAT was removed, within one month, we had about 20 per cent drop in the price of LPG.
If you now check, we had some other incidents. There were pirates’ attacks on some LPG vessels which is a major setback to LPG penetration.
