Refineries on 60% delivery as NNPC begins backward integration in fuel imports
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) said it is reducing products importation as it continues to grow local capacity production which has gone up to 60%.
The Group Managing Director of NNPC, Dr Maikanti Baru, gave the hint, explaining that NNPC was keen on ending product importation in a few years and that a concrete plan was on ground to achieve that.
“We are putting together various programmes to ensure that we achieve at least 60% 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 utilization by the end of this year or at worst by the first quarter of 2018 and get to 80% 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.
