By Adedapo Adesanya
Nigeria aims to reopen its Kaduna oil refinery next year, with initial production of 60,000 barrels a day.
This was disclosed by the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources for Oil, Mr Heineken Lokpobiri, during a visit to the facility last Saturday.
Nigeria as a crude oil exporter is not able to produce its own oil due to moribund refineries. Instead, it exports the raw product and buys the imported refined outcomes like petrol and diesel. Efforts by successive administrations to build refineries that were first built over 40 years ago remain without tangible results.
Upon assumption of office in late May, President Bola Tinubu removed fuel subsidies and this drove calls for yet another interest for the nation to become the producer of its own oil and cut reliance on imported refined crude.
The 110,000 barrels per day Kaduna Refinery in northern Nigeria was shut in 2018 because of a lack of crude due to vandalism of the pipeline that supplies crude from the oil-producing Niger Delta in the south of the country.
In February, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited signed a $741 million contract with South Korean group Daewoo to modernise the Kaduna refinery.
Mr Lokpobiri, one of Nigeria’s two ministers of state for petroleum resources, inspected rehabilitation work at the refinery and said the plant “will be back on stream by the fourth quarter of 2024.”
On his part, the chief executive of NNPC, Mr Mele Kyari, said once the refinery starts processing 60,000 barrels, “We can start to make money from the plant and we can continue the other part of the refinery to bring it up to its full-fledged capacity.”
NNPC is also upgrading the Port Harcourt and Warri refineries.
Nigeria’s state-owned refineries have a combined capacity of 445,000 barrels per day with that the nation’s local refining capacity will climb to 1.5 million barrels per day by 2025 when refinery projects ongoing in the country come on stream.
Business Post reports that efforts by Dangote Refinery and other private refineries to contribute to the self-production target are slow, with a promise for Dangote to begin production this month failing to actualise as reported.
