Barely six months of operation, Port Harcourt refinery is shut down for repair work

By allcitynews.ng

The management of Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC Ltd) has announced the temporary closure of Port Harcourt refinery for repair work.

The refinery began operation with first consignment of loaded trucks on Tuesday November  26, 2024.

The shut down, according to NNPC Chief Corporate Communications Officer, Olufemi Soneye, will start from Saturday May 24 2025 and last for  a month.

The Port Harcourt Refinery comprises two units, with the old plant having a refining capacity of 60,000 barrels per day (bpd) and the new plant 150,000 bpd, both summing up to 210,000 bpd.

It would be recalled that the refinery, which was shut down years, secured the service of Italy’s Maire Tecnimont to handle the review of the refinery complex, with oil major Eni appointed technical adviser, took about six years to be revived.

In 2021, NNPC Ltd said repairs had started after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) approved $1.5 billion for the project.

On 21 December 2023, the Nigerian government announced the mechanical completion and the flare start-off of the refinery.

Nigeria owns four refineries, two located in Port Harcourt and one in Warri and Kaduna. But the refineries have been moribund for many years despite Turn-Around-Maintenance (TAM) efforts.

The moribund state of the local refineries pushed Nigeria to depend solely on the importation of petroleum products for domestic use for many years, constituting a major drain on the nation’s foreign reserves.

For decades, successive administrations  promised and made moves aimed at reviving the nation’s refineries to reduce dependency on petrol importation met  brickwall resistance.

In 2015, former President Muhammadu Buhari pledged to revive the country’s minimally performing refineries to optimum capacity and boost foreign reserves by ending the importation of refined fuel.

In November 2018, the Buhari administration fixed December 2019 as the deadline for three refineries to attain full production capacity to end petroleum importation in the country. Later in the month, the deadline was shifted to 2020.

Even though the 2020 deadline was not realised, the government spent N10.23 billion in June 2020 on three refineries that processed zero crude.

In May 2023, the House of Representatives ad-hoc committee on the state of refineries in the country said the federal government spent over N11 trillion on the rehabilitation of the refineries from 2010 to 2023.

In August 2023, the President Bola Tinubu administration assured that the PHRC would become functional by December after numerous failed attempts, noting that Warri would come on stream by the end of the first quarter of 2024, and Kaduna would also come on board towards the end of 2024. However, the timelines were not met at the time.

On Monday, the presidency announced that plans for the complete privatisation of Nigeria’s state-owned refineries are currently underway.

Do you wish to ADVERTISE Your Brand Or Need Event Coverage?
Or Have Breaking story with pictorial evidence? Or wants to assist us by DONATIONS?
kindly contact us via  09159744240/allcitynews86@gmail.com

Goal of allcitynews.ng/allcitynews.blog:-
To interface between policy makers & general public, be most influential, informative and reliable issues-based online newspaper.

Disclaimer:
Comments expressed here do not in anyway reflect the opinions of allcitynews.ng or any employee thereof.