After many years of waiting and push and push, the Port Harcourt refinery on Tuesday began the evacuation of refined products.
It was all jubilation among petroleum products marketers and consumers as trucks filed in to receive fuel at the loading bay attached to the refinery.
An engineer working on the rehabilitation project confirmed to National Point that evacuation of fuel has resumed under the supervision of the Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, NNPCL, Melee Kyari.
However it could not be confirmed what quantity of products would be evacuated daily or how much the products will begin to sell after Tuesday’s resumption of product loading.
Operations of the old Port Harcourt refinery have been in fits and starts after it was mechanically commissioned in December, 2023. At some point, the plant was shut down after a section of it caught fire.
The rehabilitation of the old refinery was part of a $1.5 billion comprehensive turnaround maintenance of the two Port Harcourt refineries whose contract was awarded in 2021. The old refinery rehabilitation was to be completed within two years. But it suffered setbacks following discoveries that certain key facilities needed to be rehabilitated and reconfigured were not captured in the contract.
The project came to a halt before President Bola Tinubu ordered that it be completed by August 2023. Efforts to meet the August 2023 failed and what followed were new deadlines that ran monthly until December 2023 when the Minister of State (Oil), Heineken Lokpobiri, cane down from Abuja to commission the mechanical completion of the plant.
But the plant could not take off because of new issues discovered in the process. By April, 2024, the management of NNPCL disclosed that Shell Petroleum Development Company Limited had supplied 450,000 barrels of crude oil to the refinery.
After then everything about the refinery became speculative until Tuesday when it was confirmed that loading had started. National Point gathered that most of the products bring evacuated were produced during the test running of the plant.
Nigerians are hoping that the plant’s operation is sustained to help bring down the price of fuel, which largely imported.
