It could be recalled that some days after Buhari came into power, during the fuel scarcity palava, He announced that refineries in Nigeria will begin operation soonest.
However, The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation has announced that the Port Harcourt and Warri refineries have begun production.
The national oil company made this disclosure on Wednesday through a statement.
It said the plants had started preliminary production of petroleum products after successful test-runs.
The statement further noted that while the Port Harcourt Refining Company was ramping up capacity to about 60 per cent of the 210,000 barrels per day of crude capacity, production from the Warri Refining and Petrochemical Company had been projected to hit 80 per cent of its installed capacity 125,000 bpd.
The corporation added that the Port Harcourt refinery will have a product yield of five million litres of petrol per day, while the Warri refinery will contribute 3.5 million litres of petrol to the local refining capacity.
“Though a decision was taken in 2011 to rehabilitate all the refineries using the original refinery builder of each of the refineries, we were impelled to switch strategy after the ORBs declined participation and nominated some partners in their stead, who came up with outrageously unfavourable terms,” it explained.
“The phased rehabilitation strategy, which entailed phased and simultaneous rehabilitation of all the refineries using in-house and locally available resources in line with the spirit and letter of the Nigerian Content Law, also involved the use of Original Equipment Manufacturer representatives to effect major equipment overhaul and rehabilitation,” it added.
The NNPC also noted that the phased rehabilitation programme, which commenced in October 2014 after the required funding stream was established, created a 70 per cent reduction in costs, which helped largely in mitigating the financing challenges of the rehabilitation.
It said that with the successful re-streaming of the PHRC and WRPC, attention had now shifted to the 110,000 barrels per day Kaduna Refining and Petrochemical Company, which is billed to come on stream soon.