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| Warri Refinery | credits: http://www.urhobotimes.com |
The Nigerian National Petroleum
Corporation has announced the successful re-streaming of the Port
Harcourt and Warri refineries after nine months of phased rehabilitation
conducted by its in-house engineers and technicians.
The national oil company made the announcement on Wednesday through a statement.
It said the plants had commenced
preliminary production of petroleum products after successful test-runs,
noting that while the Port Harcourt Refining Company was ramping up
capacity to about 60 per cent of the 210,000 barrels per day of crude
capacity, production from the Warri Refining and Petrochemical Company
had been projected to hit 80 per cent of its installed capacity 125,000
bpd.
According
to the NNPC, the Port Harcourt refinery will have a product yield of
five million litres of petrol per day, while the Warri refinery will
contribute 3.5 million litres of petrol to the local refining capacity.
Providing insight into the
rehabilitation of the plants, the NNPC noted that it had to adopt the
phased rehabilitation approach after the original builders of the
refineries, who were initially contacted for the turnaround maintenance
of the plants, came up with unfavourable terms.
“Though a decision was taken in 2011 to
rehabilitate all the refineries using the original refinery builder of
each of the refineries, we were impelled to switch strategy after the
ORBs declined participation and nominated some partners in their stead,
who came up with outrageously unfavourable terms,” it explained.
The corporation stated that the
nominated partners, as sole bidders, came up with humongous price offers
after two years of thorough and exhaustive scope of work definition and
negotiations, adding that the proxies were also unwilling to provide
post rehabilitation performance guarantees.
“The phased rehabilitation strategy,
which entailed phased and simultaneous rehabilitation of all the
refineries using in-house and locally available resources in line with
the spirit and letter of the Nigerian Content Law, also involved the use
of Original Equipment Manufacturer representatives to effect major
equipment overhaul and rehabilitation,” it added.
The NNPC also noted that the phased
rehabilitation programme, which commenced 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 the rehabilitation.
It said that with the successful
re-streaming of the PHRC and WRPC, attention had now shifted to the
110,000 barrels per day Kaduna Refining and Petrochemical Company, which
is billed to come on stream soon.
In a related development, the NNPC has
said that it has successfully recovered the System 2B
Pipeline, which
was breached last week in Arepo, Ogun State.
The corporation stated that its team of
engineers deployed in the scene immediately after the pipeline was
vandalised, was able to access the pipeline after the fire had put out
the ensuing fire and commenced repair work immediately.
It added, “We wish to announce that the
vital System 2B Pipeline, which was breached at Arepo last week, has
been fixed and brought back on stream. Pumping of products through the
system commenced on Monday upon the successful completion of repair
works 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.”
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