P/Harcourt refinery to undergo maintenance in April

Category: Business Published on Thursday, 28 February 2013 06:00 Written by Hamisu Muhammad

From Left: Chairman, Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission, Mr. Elias Mbam; representative of the Executive Secretary, Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), Mr. Orji Ogbonnaya Orji and representative of the Director, Department of Petroleum Resources, Mr. Alfred Ohiani at the NEITI workshop on Fiscal Allocation and Statutory Disbursements Audit in Abuja yesterday.

The Port Harcourt Refinery and Petrochemical plant will undergo a comprehensive Turn Around Maintenance in April this year, after 14 years, the Managing Director of the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) Engineer Andrew Yakubu has said.

Yakubu said in Arepo, Ogun state that the government is determined to make the refineries perform at optimal capacity.

He said the minister of petroleum resources had made a promised that all the three refineries will undergo the TAM before the end of the year. The refineries are located in Port Harcourt, Kaduna, and Warri.

“The TAM is starting from Port Harcourt, we mobilised contractors and we will soon signed agreement,” he said.

The 210,000 barrel per day capacity twin Port Harcourt Refinery was last maintained in 1999 nearly 14 years ago.

Experts said a fully functional refinery should undergo TAM every two years.

The 125,000 b/d capacity refinery in Warri was last maintained in 2004 while the 110,000 b/d capacity refinery in Kaduna experienced its last TAM in 2008.

On the present performance of the refineries, Yakubu said this is the first time the three refineries are running at the same time at nearly optimal capacity.

“Special attention was given to the refineries, to the extent that as at the close of business last year all the three refineries were operational,” said Yakubu.

According to him the performance of the refineries will be of no use if there is no pipeline to evacuate the refined products to the end users and “that is why we are looking at it holistically to deploy new technology to protect the pipelines.”