Nigeria’s new oil minister stated last week that the country expects all four oil refineries to be ready by the end of the year, with the southern Port Harcourt facility possibly beginning operations as early as December.
The Port Harcourt refinery will begin processing oil by the end of 2022, the government announced last year.
However, NNPC Ltd executives and succeeding oil ministers have launched a number of fruitless plans to restart, remodel, or enlarge the refineries.
Heineken Lokpobiri, who re-started serving as Nigeria’s minister of state for petroleum, checked on the two-unit Port Harcourt refinery’s continuing renovations today.
He said that two further facilities in Warri and Kaduna will begin processing crude between the first quarter and the end of 2024.
“From what we have seen here today, Port Harcourt refinery will come on board by the end of the year,” he said.
“Our objective,” according to Lokpobiri, “is to make sure that Nigeria stops importing fuel in the next few years.”
Due to insufficient capacity and poor maintenance, Nigeria, Africa’s biggest oil producer, imports virtually all of its refined petroleum requirements.
The 110,000-barrel Kaduna facility in the north and three facilities in the oil-rich Niger delta, including the 125,000-barrel Warri refinery, are among four state-owned deteriorating refineries that formerly produced a combined 4450,000 barrels per day.
Following the award of the contract for the work to be completed in 2021 to Italy’s Tecnimont, the Port Harcourt refinery is undertaking a $1.5 billion overhaul. The oil ministry estimated in April of last year that the renovation would take 44 months to complete.
The nation is now resting its hopes on a 650,000-per-day refiner being built by Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, to put a halt to gasoline imports.
