On Wednesday, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited revealed how five ethanol-laden Premium Motor Spirit (petrol) cargoes were rejected after the first was found to be defective.
Melee Kyari, the NNPC’s Group Managing Director, also revealed that the firm was pursuing damages from suppliers of the poor PMS, stating that Duke Oil, one of the company’s subsidiaries, was also to blame.
Kyari stated this when testifying before the House Committee on Petroleum Resources (Downstream) to explain the circumstances behind the recent delivery of an off-spec variety of the commodity, which has resulted in a crisis in Nigeria.
The NNPC’s GMD expressed concern for the challenges inflicted to Nigerians as a result of the ‘bad’ gasoline supply, stating that the struggles are that ongoing will come to an end by next week as efforts are being made by the company to correct the situation.
He said, “On the basis of those contracts, our suppliers bring products to us and reconcile with them regularly. Part of those supply arrangements is to give specifications to your suppliers.
“These specifications are bound by regulation and the latest that we are using is the one that is in place since 2006. All our partners were given those specifications and on the basis of this, those imports were made.
“In the case of all the problems we have seen, five of the cargoes that are particularly in question today met all these criteria on arrival and that was why they were allowed to discharge into terminals and conveyed into ships.
“There was simply no way, based on the current specification, that you will know this PMS contains methanol. It is not part of their requirements at the load port. So, we did not ask them to declare whether it contained methanol because it is not part of our specification.”
