Nigerian Refineries Not for Sale - Kachikwu

Thu, Sep 3, 2015

By publisher

3 MIN READ

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The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation says the federal government is not selling its refineries although it will unbundle Pipelines and Products Marketing Company

THE Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, is to start unbundling the Pipelines and Products Marketing Company Ltd into three different companies in a bid to ensure lean, efficient and profitable operations, The PPMC would be split into a pipelines company that would focus primarily on the maintenance of the over five thousand kilometers pipelines of the Corporation; a storage company that would maintain all the over 23 depots and a products marketing company that would market and sell petroleum products. This would ensure that the right set of skills are rightly positioned and the number of leakages in terms of pipelines break and products loss are reduced to the barest minimum.

Ibe Kachikwu, group managing director, GMD, of the NNPC, made this disclosure during an official tour of the Okrika Jetty and the Port Harcourt Refining Company Limited on Wednesday, September 2.  He noted that the ongoing phased rehabilitation of all the state owned refineries would be given an accelerated vigour with the aim of reducing petroleum products importation into the country, adding that at full capacity, all the refineries could supply only 20 million litres of premium motor spirit otherwise known as petrol on a daily basis.

Kachikwu said the refineries would not be sold but joint venture partners with established track records of success in refining would be invited to support the running of the refineries in order to ensure efficiency. He stated that efforts are in top gear to fix all the crude and petroleum products pipelines across the country, stressing that the Nigerian Airforce would be engaged to provide aerial survey of the pipelines, the Nigerian army engineering corps to fix and police the pipelines and the Nigerian Navy to provide marine surveillance for the network of pipelines.

Kachikwu commended the NNPC’s engineers for the successful execution of the ongoing phased rehabilitation of the refineries while urging them to prepare a replacement programmes for obsolete spare parts of all the corporation’s installations in order to avoid intermittent shut down of facilities.

Similarly, Bafred Audu Enjugu, managing director of the PHRC, said the ongoing phased rehabilitation of the company cost a little less than $10 million, adding that the job was holistically carried out by indigenous engineers without any foreign support.

According to a press release signed by Ohi Alegbe and made available to Realnews magazine, September 2, Esther Namdi-Ogbue, managing director of Pipelines and Products Marketing Company Limited, assured the GMD that the company would think outside the box to provide solutions to all the challenges confronting the Company.

— September 2. 2015 @ 11: 40 GMT

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