Nigeria’s refineries lose N4.54b in one month

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has put the losses made by Nigeria’s three refineries in the month of August at N4.54 billion.

NNPC’s refineries are Port Harcourt Refining Company (PHRC 1&2), Kaduna Refining & Petrochemical Company Limited (KRPC), and Warri Refining & Petrochemical Company Limited (WRPC).

According NNPC in its monthly financial report released on Monday, the combined value of output by the three refineries (at import parity price) for August 2017 amounted to ₦25.10billion while the associated crude plus freight costs, and operational expenses were ₦21.32billion and ₦8.41billion respectively.

This, it noted, resulted to an operating deficit of ₦4.64billion by the refineries.

NNPC said that during the period under review, the refineries combined capacity utilisation was 9.50 per cent with PHRC recording the highest of 33.83 per cent.

NNPC stated: “For the month of August 2017, the three Refineries produced 95,548MT of finished Petroleum Products and Intermediate product of 53,496MT out of 178,788MT of Crude processed at a combined capacity utilization of 9.50% compared to 11.94 per cent combined capacity utilization achieved in the month of July2017.

“The deprived operational performance is attributed to KRPC and PHRC downtime during the month under review. The ongoing revamping of the Refineries will enhance capacity utilization once completed.”

It put the total crude processed by the three refineries (KRPC, PHRC & WRPC) in August at 178,788MT (1,310,873.62 bbls), which translates to a combined yield efficiency of 83.36 per cent compared with the 224,584MT (1,646,649.89 bbls) processed in July, which translates to a combined yield efficiency of 89.11 per cent.

Group Managing Director of the Corporation, Maikanti Baru, assured that adequate measures were in place to ensure that motorists have unimpeded access to fuel ahead of the forthcoming end-of-year festivities.

Baru said provision of adequate petroleum products would not only ease transportation, but would also make our roads safer for motorists, just as other consumers too would have no need to hoard highly inflammable products in jerry cans, among others, which may pose as safety challenge to them.

“As we speak, NNPC has over two billion litres of petrol, and we want to sustain this level from now on till the end of the year and beyond. This volume would give the country product sufficiency of about 60 days, well above the standard 30 days sufficiency threshold,’’