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.
During an inspection tour of the rehabilitation work at the PHRC Ltd. plant, Lokpobiri made this statement.
“Our goal in being here today is to make sure that Nigeria ceases importing fuel within the next few years. According to what we have observed here today, Port Harcourt Refinery will join by year’s end,” he stated in August
More than two years have passed since the Federal Government authorized $1.5 billion (1.2 billion euros) in funding to repair one of its largest oil refineries, when operations at the Port Harcourt refinery resumed.
The government selected Maire Tecnimont, an Italian company, to handle the facility’s repairs at the Port Harcourt location, which can produce about 210,000 barrels per day.
“We are pleased to announce that the productivity refinery rehabilitation will begin in three stages,” Timipre Sylva, the state’s minister of petroleum at the time, said to reporters.
“The refinery will reach 90 percent of its nameplate capacity in 18 months when the first phase is finished,” stated Sylva. The second phase will be finished 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).
Resuming refinery operations at the facility and starting a similar project at the Dangote Refinery are expected to improve the supply of fuel in Africa’s largest oil producer and allow the country to make 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 either negatively or positively.
