Kaduna Refinery and Petrochemical Company, which has the
capacity to refine 110,000 barrels of crude oil a day, restarted production on
Saturday after it was closed for months for repairs.
The managing director, Pipelines and Products marketing
Company, Esther Nnamdi-Ogbue, said on Sunday that the plant, which was closed
in September, came back on stream ahead of the December deadline for Nigeria’s
four refineries to return to full production.
The group managing director of the Nigerian National
Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, Ibe Kachikwu, had issued a 90-day ultimatum to the
managements of the four refineries shortly after his appointment last August.
Mrs. Nnamdi-Ogbue said the Kaduna plant, which is currently
undergoing a test run of its production lines, is expected to commence trucking
of petrol by the end of next week.
“Kaduna refinery came back on stream on Saturday as
scheduled and is running,” the PPMC boss told PREMIUM TIMES on Sunday, via text
message.
“PMS (Premium Motor spirit, also called petrol) should be
available for trucking by the end of the week. The refinery is expected to
produce an average of about 1.6 million litres of PMS daily once in full
operation,” she said.
Prior to its closure in September, Kaduna refinery had
stopped working for most part of the year, except briefly in July and August,
when its utilisation capacity dropped to about 2.6 per cent and 10.5 per cent
respectively, according the NNPC monthly operational report for October.
On Friday, Mrs. Nnamdi-Ogbue said resumption of production
in other refineries would follow before the end of the year, first by the
210,000 bpd-capacity Port Harcourt refinery shut-down since October.
The 125,000 bpd-capacity Warri refinery, which was closed
since September for repairs, would be the last to come back on stream,
according to the resumption timeline expected to see all the refineries come
back on before the end of the year.
The restart of production at the Kaduna refinery should be a
cheering news for Nigerians, who have endured weeks of scarcity of petroleum
products.
Part of the problem is because PPMC is currently saddled
with the responsibility of importing and supplying 100 per cent of the average
40 million litres daily national fuel consumption capacity, as none of the
major and independent oil marketers is involved in the fuel importation
programme in the country at the moment.
Before now, the PPMC and the other oil marketers used to
split the responsibility of importing fuel at the ratio of 52:48.
But, with the backlog of unpaid fuel subsidy and
accumulated foreign exchange differential, the oil marketers had opted out of
further importatio
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