Monday 9 January 2017

NNPC PROMISES TO REFINE 50% OF FUEL CONSUMED LOCALLY BY 2018

The Nigerian National Pe­troleum Corporation (NNPC) has expressed hope that it will be able to refine 50 percent of petrol con­sumed in Nigeria by 2018. The corporation said it hopes to achieve this by improving the refin­ing capacity of its refineries by 80 percent that year.

The Group Managing Director of NNPC, Dr. Maikanti Baru, stated this when he was visited by a team from Media Trust Limited, pub­lishers of Daily Trust Newspapers, led by its Chairman, Mallam Kab­iru Yusuf. A statement by NNPC spokes­man, Ndu Ughamadu, said the cor­poration has commenced moves to reduce products importation by boosting the capacity utilization of the refineries to 60 per cent by the end of this year.

Dr. Baru, according to the state­ment, explained that NNPC was keen on ending product importa­tion in a few years and that a con­crete plan was on ground to achieve that. “We are putting together vari­ous programmes to ensure that we achieve at least 60 percent local re­fining by the end of this year. It is the procedure or methodology that we are changing a little bit, we are focusing on the process licensors to come and audit our processes and they
have already started auditing most of our process units in the var­ious refineries.

“We hope if we do all these sys­tematically, we should be able to get about 60 per cent level of capacity utilization by the end of this year or at worst by the first quarter of 2018 and get to 80 percent by the end of 2018 so that we could local­ly be able to supply half of our PMS requirements. Also, with other efforts in terms of other refineries coming in place, we should be able to quit importa­tion in a few years,” the GMD stat­ed.

Dr Baru lauded the manage­ment of Media Trust Limited for its factual reportage of the corpo­ration’s activities and operations. He urged the media to help in enlightening the public on the dan­gers of pipeline vandalism which he said has become a drain on the na­tion’s economy. On its part, Media Trust com­mended the NNPC for excellent performance in discharging its fi­duciary responsibilities. (Authority)

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