Nigeria’s Federal Government has announced that about 43 refineries – large scale and modular – have been licensed to refine petroleum products across the country.
According to The Senior Technical Adviser to Nigeria’s Petroleum Minister on Refineries and Downstream Infrastructure, two of the refineries (modular) will be inaugurated in the coming week in the Niger Delta region.
Although Nigeria is a leading crude oil and gas producer, the country has remained the only oil producer that relies on the importation of refined petroleum products to meet local needs- a development that has given rise to economic challenges, infrastructure shortfall, unemployment, budget deficit as well as poverty, especially as government struggles to pay subsidy on over 55 million of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) also called petrol consumed daily, a system fraught with high-level corruption.
In line with government’s seven big wins policy (7BigWins), Suleiman stressed that with upcoming refineries, including the Dangote Refinery, will soon become self-sufficient and an exporter of petroleum products.
“Today, we have about 43 licensed new refineries, both modular and large-sized refineries. We have 250,000 barrels licensed refinery that was given to Petrolex. Another 100,000 barrels license refinery was given to a company in Port Harcourt. There are many others being established, from 1000 to 30000 barrels capacity”, Suleiman says.
The objective of the modular refinery is to ensure that the big capital requirement, which seems to be the major reason why they are not established is overcome by building small size refineries.”
According to him, about 10 of these have been issued authority to construct, meaning that they have already been given a licence to establish, and have been certified by the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR).
“Refineries cannot be too many in Nigeria. We want to ensure that all our crude is not exported. We want crude to be refined in Nigeria so that we can take advantage of the total value chain of crude oil conversion”, Suleiman adds.