As promised by the federal government, the Port Harcourt Refining Company in Rivers State has resumed operations with the goal of producing refined products at the facility by December 2023.
The facility underwent turnaround maintenance and underperformance for many years prior to this development. The combined processing capacity of four Nigerian refineries, located in Port Harcourt, Warri, and Kaduna, is 445,000 barrels per day (bpd). However, in 2019, they were shut down.
But in August, Senator Heineken Lokpobiri, the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources (Oil), announced that the Port Harcourt refinery will start up again in December.
Lokpobiri said this during an inspection tour of the rehabilitation work at the PHRC Ltd. plant
“Our objective in coming here today is to ensure that in the next few years, Nigeria stops fuel importation. From what we have seen here today, Port Harcourt Refinery will come on board by the end of the year,” he said in August.
The recommencement of operations at the Port Harcourt refinery comes over two years after the Federal Government approved funding of $1.5 billion (1.2 billion euros) to repair one of its biggest oil refineries.
The government chose an Italian firm Maire Tecnimont to carry out the repair work at the Port Harcourt facility which has a capacity of some 210,000 bpd.
“We are happy to announce that the rehabilitation of productivity refinery will commence in three phases,” the then-Minister of Petroleum (State) Timipre Sylva told reporters.
“The first phase is to be completed in 18 months, which will take the refinery to a production of 90 percent of its nameplate capacity,” said Sylva, adding that the second phase would be completed in 24 months and the third in 44 months.
Nigeria, the largest oil producer in Africa, has been dependent on petroleum product imports due to a lack of refining capacity within the country. Shortages of fuel occur frequently.
However, the government has been attempting to increase capacity at the nation’s underperforming state-owned refineries as part of efforts to restructure the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL).
The resumption of refinery operations at the plant and the start of a comparable project at the Dangote Refinery are expected to enhance fuel supplies in Africa’s top oil producer and enable savings on refined fuel and other petroleum products.
With the removal of subsidy on fuel, the move is also expected to impact on the cost of the product.
