The Nigeria National Petroleum Company (NNPC) has the Port Harcourt refinery will be ready by March 2023.
NNPC GMD, Mele Kyari disclosed this while responding to enquiries by members of the house of representatives on when the ongoing rehabilitation exercise of the refinery will be completed.
Kyari who was represented by the General Manager, Refineries & Petrochemicals, Mustapha Yakubu, spoke during house investigation of the state of the country’s refineries on Friday
The house ad-hoc committee, chaired by Hon. Ganiyu Johnson, set up to conduct the probe said it was to ascertain the viability of the refineries in a bid to check the huge sums appropriated for subsidy in the budget.
Speaking at the resumed investigative hearing, a member of the Committee, Hon. Johnson Ogumah told journalists that Nigerians needed to know why the country had continued to import fuel when it can refine crude locally.
The committee had engaged the Nigerian National Petroleum Company NNPC and Sapien engineering company handling the contract for the $1.3 billion rehabilitation exercise of the refineries.
“The facts are there. You know this exercise is investigative. We cannot conclude now. I cannot come to the conclusion now. At the appropriate time, Nigerians will know,” he said.
“This exercise came as a result of the oil subsidy money that we are supposed to appropriate for again. We now say with this huge amount of money, we need to know what is happening to our refineries. Also, another committee was set up to verify the number of litres that we consume per day. Everything is working to arrive at a solution that will benefit Nigerians.”
Another member of the committee, Hon. Ibrahim Isiaka said the committee will embark on a physical inspection of the refineries especially the Port Harcourt facility, where a rehabilitation exercise was ongoing to ascertain the level of investment already made in them.
He said “We need to put so many things in their right perspectives and allow Nigerians to know the challenges we are having and we put heads together to know how we are going to solve them. It’s so unfortunate that we have left what we are supposed to do undone and we have come to this level. But nothing is spoiled yet. We are on what we called damage control. The committee is a kind of fact finding so that we can have legislative input on how to assist the NNPC and the refineries managers on how we can come back on stream.
“We want to assure you that whatever that is going to be our recommendation at the end of the day will be you on that side and we on the side as legislators have come to agree on the round table. We want to appeal by Thursday, June 9, 2022, we are going converge again here.”
