How FG chickened out from reviving 4 national refineries, sings Dangote praises
Hopes of seeing any or all Nigerian moribund refineries come back to installed capacity production as promised by the present government in 2015 have been shattered.
Besides, during a recent tour of the emerging 650,000bpd private refinery and fertilizer plant being developed by Dangote Industries in Lekki, the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr Ibe Kachukwu sang praises on Dangote for the feat and further assured that with the coming on stream of the scheme, Nigeria’s intractable fuel crisis will be tamed.
Nigeria has four refineries. The Port Harcourt Refining Company is made up of two refineries. The others are the Warri Refining and Petrochemical Company and the Kaduna Refining and Petrochemical Company.
The four refineries have an installed capacity of 445,000 barrels per day, but they have continued to operate far below the installed capacity for many years.
The dashed hopes on reviving the national refineries came from recent revelation by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), midweek that it can no longer disturb itself on reviving the assets because the terms of conditions being given by revamping contractor-financiers are not agreeable after all.
Before the latest turn of events, the Managing Director of NNPC, Maikanti Baru and the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr Ibe Kachukwu had late last year at several fora, assured Nigerians that government is set to announce the contractor-financiers of all the national refineries but that never happened.
Business Hilights recalls that the strange and now failed option of looking for financiers came up when a $1.8bn revival for the refineries was rejected by the National Assembly on account of inconsistency of the Corporation on issues bordering on Turnaround Maintenance of the four national assets in the last couple of years.
As it is now, NNPC seems fed up and out of ideas on how to return the facilities to full production capacities as it has made it clear that it could not agree with the investors on the commercial terms of the transaction.
