[Ooops] Refineries Fail to Work

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Just last week most media outlets announced that the refineries are back to work and have now commenced full production
It appears however that this may not be true according to the Punch
The paper claims no refinery had been able to produce petrol in commercial quantity in the past weeks, despite claims by the operators of the facilities that they had started refining crude oil to produce petroleum products.
It maintains that in fact, senior officials of the Federal Ministry of Petroleum Resources and the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency told their correspondent in Abuja on Monday that tankers still headed for Lagos to load products.
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation last month announced that the Port Harcourt Refining Company was ramping up capacity to about 60 per cent of the 210,000 barrels per day of crude capacity, while production from the Warri Refining and Petrochemical Company had been projected to hit 80 per cent of its installed 125,000 bpd capacity.
The Manager in charge of the Production Programming and Quality Control, Kaduna Refining and Petrochemicals Company, Shehu Malami, had reportedly said that the refinery would save about $5.33m daily for the country when it hits 90 per cent production capacity in the first quarter of 2016.
But officials at the petroleum ministry and the PPPRA who was interviewed by the Punch doubted that they were workingwomdering why the refineries had yet to churn out products, particularly petrol, if actually they were operational as claimed.
Here is how the official put it
“Has any of the refineries stated the quantity of products that they are actually churning out? It is already known that Nigeria consumes an average of 40 million litres per day; so, if the refineries are working, then you can now say maybe they are producing about 20 million litres per day and you can now subtract that from the imports. We need to verify if indeed they have started churning out products, not just on paper. Just two weeks ago, they gave letters of allocation to importers to bring in products to meet the third quarter consumption demand.”
In his reaction, the National President, Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria, Mr. Chinedu Okoronkwo, said the refineries were working but they had constraints in terms of supplying products to marketers.
Source: Punch

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