Nov 25, 2015 During a recent interview, head of the Nigerian National petroleum commission revealed that the country’s refineries will produce up to 30 percent of the Nigeria’s domestic gasoline needs by the first quarter of 2016.
Despite being Africa’s biggest oil producer, Nigeria currently imports almost all of its domestic gasoline demand, half of which is heavily subsidized by the federal government.
With this on the backdrop, President Muhammadu Buhari, who is also the country’s petroleum minister, has made refurbishing the country’s refining system one of his top priorities.
The new head of refining at NNPC, Dennis Ajulu also announced plans to ramp up the individual capacities of the refineries to 80 percent. This will ensure the production of between 10 to 12.5 million liters of gasoline per day against a 40 million liters daily consumption.
However, the refineries will still need more investment and NNPC is in the process of raising around $500 million for some long term works.
Commenting on this Dennis Ajulu said:
“For instance Kaduna will require a distribution control system that’s for Kaduna which is some reasonable cost then Kaduna will also require major aspects of utilities and electric power and instrument and control reliability, that’s for Kaduna. So also for Warri, you want some measure of reliability for long term equipment for the power system, the steam system and then some of the units,”
Addressing the challenge of crude supply, Ajulu said that the state firm was looking at options to build “co-located” refineries near the existing ones.
“What we have currently is that we want to get the refineries that are in place working well but as they are working well we are also mindful that we require additional capacity to meet the product’s demand locally so one of the options we are looking at is a kind of expansion programme. One of those options will be by side of each of the existing refineries, put a co-located refinery,”