Nigeria is expected to complete the rehabilitation of its Port Harcourt refinery and begin production in about 18 months, Mele Kyari, Group Managing Director of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), has said.
The Federal Executive Council (FEC), last Wednesday, approved a sum of $1.5 billion for the rehabilitation of Port Harcourt refinery in Rivers State.
The repair, which will be executed by Tecnimont SPA, an Italian company, will be done in three phases of 18, 24 and 44 months.
Mr Kyari who was reacting to controversies around the recent approval for the project said the exercise would include a complete rehabilitation and not turnaround maintenance of the refinery.
He said major components of the refinery would be replaced as the contractor executes the repair in phases.
The NNPC MD said the refinery would begin production of gas after 18 months of repair.
“We are not doing turnaround maintenance. We are doing rehabilitation of the refinery, and it is very different. It means that we are replacing certain major components,” he said.
“We are introducing some items that ordinarily we won’t need to do in turnaround maintenance, and there are major shifts in the status of the plant that we have to do and it is not done during turnaround maintenance.
“During rehabilitation, by the 18th month, part of this plant will begin to produce particularly the gasoline plants. In rehabilitation, we normally don’t shut down the plant completely; we repair a segment of it, and then it starts working, and then, you move to the next segment.
“You continue to scale up and that is why within the four-year period, the contractor would have completely left your premises. What it means in a technical sense is that in 18 months, we will see production coming from that plant. We will follow it plant by plant until we are completely done.”
Mr Kyari said process of rehabilitation started about 10 years ago but was slowed down due to a number of mistakes.
He said the Federal Government resorted to partly fund the project through borrowings in order to ensure compliance with required conditions.
“This process started 10 years ago and a number of mistakes happened, leading to the enormous delay we have seen in this process because there were a lot of interferences in the past but these are gone,” he said.
He said Afreximbank has promised a US$500 million loan in the first instance and an additional US$500 million, making it US$1 billion, and the condition is for the loans to be repaid from the operations and proceeds of this plant.
Source:www.energynewsafrica.com
