P/H, Warri Refineries Begin Daily Production Of 8.5m Litres Of Petrol

 The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has announced that the Port Harcourt and Warri refineries have been successfully re-streamed after a nine months’ phased rehabilitation exercise conducted by its in-house engineers and technicians.

This was contained in a statement issued yesterday where the corporation revealed that while the Port Harcourt refinery is ramping up its operation to about 60 per cent of its 210,000 barrels per day name plate capacity, Warri refinery production is projected to hit 80 per cent of its installed 125,000 bpd capacity.

“The nominated partners, as sole-bidders came up with humongous price offers after two years of thorough and exhaustive scope of work definition and price negotiations. The proxies were also unwilling to provide post- rehabilitation performance guarantees,” the statement said.

It added however, that the phased rehabilitation strategy which entailed simultaneous rehabilitation of all the refineries using in-house and locally available resources in line with the Nigerian content law, also involved the use of original equipment manufacturer representatives to effect major equipment overhaul and rehabilitation.

The corporation informed that the rehabilitation programme which started in October 2014, after the required funding stream was established, created a 70 per cent reduction in costs which helped largely in mitigating the financing challenges of refinery rehabilitation.

With the successful re-streaming of these refineries, attention has now moved to the 110,000 barrels per day Kaduna refining and petrochemicals company which is billed to come on stream soon, the NNPC said.

This comes as the corporation also disclosed that it has successfully recovered the System 2B pipeline which was breached last week at Arepo, Ogun State.

Alegbe noted that the team of engineers who were deployed to the scene of the incident were able to access the pipeline after the fire was put out and commenced repair work immediately.

“Pumping of products through the system commenced on Monday upon successful completion of repair work over the weekend.

We also wish to call on all those engaged in the criminal acts of pipeline sabotage and oil theft to desist in order to avoid such horrendous deaths as was witnessed in the recent incident,”.he said.