‘How to address redundancy in Nigeria’s refinery operations’

Considering redundancy challenges, especially poor capacity utilisation affecting refineries in Nigeria despite the huge import of refined petroleum products, Managing Director, Waltersmith Petroman Oil Limited, Chikezie Nwosu has urged the country to leverage modular refineries to bridge the gap.
   
Stressing that the development would meet the needs of the people and the ability to build an economic model that works, Nwosu said given Nigeria’s challenges, focusing on modular refineries would allow the country to address the issue of redundancy.
   
“If there is a problem with one of them, you can still deliver petroleum products. The problem with building one hug refinery is that if something goes wrong and enough redundancy has not been built-in, then you cannot send out the refined products. This will impact your volume significantly. Going through a modular approach helps against that redundancy,” he said in an interview.
 

“Instead of continuously arguing about the poorer consumers, who don’t have the ability to pay, why not shift the paradigm, deliver power to industrial giants, who will come into a place and have the ability to pay. The cost of increasing from 300 Megawatts to 350 MW is not the same as going from zero to 300MW. By the time you put in 300MW of power and you have customers that are paying, it is possible to do an expansion and deliver to customers that pay less. The hope is that the customers paying less
  
He noted that intervention of the Nigerian local content board on the Waltersmith refinery has fast-tracked the project, stressing that apart from being a partner they have helped in navigating through the regulations, providing an understanding of the local content issues.