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– Senate Disowns Report On Exposing Fraud In Refineries Rehabilitation
The Grouo Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Ltd, Mele Kyari has said that the Port Harcourt Refinery has received 450,000 barrels of crude for processing following the mechanical completion of the plant in December, last year.
He said this during a session with the Senate Ad-hoc Committee on Investigation of Turn Around Maintenance (TAM) in the nation’s refineries.
The Port Harcourt refinery located in the oil-rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria has been operational since 1965. It is the oldest and the biggest of the three government-owned oil refining sites in the West African country.
The oil refinery complex consists of a 60,000 barrels per day (bpd) old refinery that started operations in 1965 and a 150,000bpd new refinery that came on stream in 1989.
Despite having a combined crude processing capacity of 210,000bpd, the Port Harcourt refinery, like other state refineries of the country, had been operating only at a fraction of its capacity over the last few decades due to process inefficiency and lack of maintenance. This had led to the growing reliance of Nigeria, Africa’s largest crude producer, on imports of refined petroleum products.
The PHRC rehabilitation project, which costs about $1.5bn, is an EPCIC project that covers Engineering, Procurement, Construction, Installation, and commissioning phases.
For Area-5, which is a segment of the refinery that will produce 60 million barrels per day, the Engineering, Procurement, Construction, and Installation have all been completed. The mechanical completion signifies the closure of the construction and installation phases, according to NNPCL.
The milestone was achieved under a Health, Safety and Environment record, which stood at over 9.5 million man-hour with zero Loss Time Injury.
On April 7, 2021, the NNPC officially signed a contract with Tecnimont SPA for the $1.5bn rehabilitation programme of the Port Harcourt Refining Company.
Parties in the agreement also announced the commencement of the project following the signing of the contract at the headquarters of the company in Abuja
The rehabilitation project, being undertaken in three phases, is expected to be completed by 2025. But the first phase of the project, which is the mechanical completion phase, was done by the NNPC in December
The new Port Harcourt refinery comprises a Crude Distillation Unit (CDU), a Vacuum Distillation Unit (VDU), a Naphtha Hydrotreating Unit (NHTU), a Catalytic Reforming Unit (CRU), a Continuous Catalyst Regeneration (CCR) Unit, a kerosene hydrotreating unit, a fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) unit, and a dimersol unit to convert propylene into a gasoline blendstock.
It also houses a butamer isomerisation unit, an alkylation unit, apart from hydrogen purification, fuel gas vaporiser, sour water and caustic treatment units.
The old refinery comprises a CDU, a CRU, and a liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) facility.
The refinery complex uses four turbo-generators of 14MW an hour of electricity generation capacity each and four boilers of 120 tonnes (t) an hour of steam generation capacity each.
The refinery products include petrol, diesel, LPG, aviation and domestic kerosene, low pour fuel oil (LPFO), and heavy pour fuel oil (HPFO).
Speaking during the session wkth the lawmakers, the GCEO called for the cooperation of all stakeholders in the rehabilitation process, stressing that “we are all serving this country dutifully and loyally. Nigerians must understand that gradually, we shall get this task done.”
Kyari assured Nigerians that the delivery date of the Port Harcourt and other refineries remains sacrosanct.
“We will make sure that promises that we made about the rehabilitation of these refineries are kept. We did a mechanical completion of PHRC in December. Now, we have crude oil already stocked in it. It is currently undergoing regulatory compliance test before we restream it. I assure you that this refinery will start in next two weeks.
“For Warri, we have also done mechanical work on it. It is undergoing regulatory compliance processes that we are doing with our regulators. Kaduna will be ready by December this year, but we have not reached that stage. We believe that it will also be ready on schedule,” the GCEO stated.
Meanwhile, the Senate has dismissed media reports claiming that it will expose all “frauds associated with the contracts and management of the Turn Around Maintenance of the nation’s refineries”.
A news report last week claimed that the Senate through its Ad-hoc Committee on Investigation of Turn Around Maintenance (TAM) in the nation’s refineries has vowed to “expose all frauds associated with the contracts and management of the process.”
Chairman of the Ad-hoc Committee, Senator Ifeanyi Ubah, who expressed displeasure over the “unfortunate reports” at an interactive session on Thursday, said the National Assembly couldn’t have declared verdict on an issue that is still under investigation.
“I apologise for the reports. I was quoted out of context”, Senator Uba said at the interactive session.
The Senator further noted that the Committee’s concern was aimed at getting the nation’s refineries fully rehabilitated and returned to their respective optimal refining capacities so as to ensure nationwide petroleum products sufficiency and safeguard Nigeria’s energy security.
The Senate Ad-hoc Committee is expected to visit the three refineries in Kaduna, Warri and Port Harcourt soon for an on-the-spot assessment of work progress.
