EDO STATE: Lucky Obukohwo, Reporting
The Edo Refinery and Petrochemicals Company Limited (ERPCL), has accused the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL of plot to strangulate it by deliberately not supplying it crude oil to the full functional 1,000 barrels per day stream refinery to start production.
It said beside the directive by President Bola Tinubu to the NNPCL to supply crude oil to Dangote Refinery and other modular refineries in the country in naira, the Edo Refinery is yet to get any from the relevant authorities.
Speaking to journalists in Benin-City, the management of the refinery located at Ologbo, Ikpoba-Okha Local Government Area, said it was facing significant challenges due to persistent lack of crude oil supply.
Representative of the company, Segun Okeni, said the refinery, which required 1,000 barrels per day, can barely function at fully installed capacity.
He said though the company has existing crude oil supply agreements with Seplat and ND Western since 2022, bureaucratic bottlenecks have prevented the refinery from accessing the much-needed resource.
He alleged that in 2021, ERPCL’s letter addressed to Mele Kyari, group chief executive officer of NNPCL after having a series of meetings and constant communication with him, non of them yielded results.
The ERPCL representative, however, stated that despite the meetings, correspondences and communications with NNPCL over the past three years on the issues of crude oil supply, nothing was done.
Besides, he identified other key issues encountered by the refinery as the inability of NNPCL to assign any of the preferred fields to allocate crude to the company since it started having engagement with the management on August 18, 2021, pointing out that even with the options given to allocate crude to the refinery from ND Western, First Hydrocarbon and Seplat, nothing has happened till date.
On the way forward, he said NNPCL and other producers need to put loading infrastructure in place to allow for truck loading, decrying why Dangote would be getting 30,000bp because it opened up to the public while smaller refineries were not being served, which he likened to no respect for small people who can also grow the economy alongside the big players.
The representative of ERPCL is, therefore, seeking Kyari’s intervention as group CEO of NNPCL for NUIMS to give occurrence to the Seplat-ERPCL agreement to enable Edo Refinery to start lifting crude oil from Oil Mining License.
He described the past two years as frustrating for the establishment. “If we local investors can’t get crude even as small as we are, how can foreign investors be encouraged to invest in the country?
The total daily demand of all modular refineries is not up to to two percent of the daily crude oil production. Our lifting from the pumping station will even reduce pipeline losses.”
Okeni argued that the advantage of loading from NNPCL pumping station to the expert terminal is that it costs less because the cost of pipeline export terminal charges and loss will be saved which should make the modular refineries more competitive than the offshore refineries which come to the export terminal to take the crude thereby making cost-savings to trickle down to Nigeria consumers.
He revealed that Nigeria was losing millions of dollars following the inability of NNPCL to supply modular refineries over the past three years whose total installed capacity is less than 30,000bpd.