May 11, (THEWILL) – With the new management team recently constituted by President Bola Tinubu for the behemoth Nigeria National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) in place, one fact is certain: The unending maintenance of the nation’s four refineries will now come to a halt.
There will also emerge a group of state facilities that would snowball into the status of national relics. Perhaps what would quicken the transformation could be the outcome of the investigation into the affairs of the behemoth national oil company that is widely believed to be the cesspool of corruption.
Recently, an economist and energy sector analyst, Kelvin Emmanuel, stated that the NNPCL’s refineries are idle and that Dangote Refinery is currently the only facility in Nigeria genuinely producing Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), commonly referred to as petrol.
Emmanuel made the claim while speaking during the Morning Brief programme on Channels Television on May 6, 2025.
He dismissed the government’s narrative around the rejuvenation of state-owned refineries, arguing that they are either non-functional or engaging in mere blending operations, not actual refining of PMS.
He said: “I’ve always said it and I stand by it: The only refinery in Nigeria producing PMS is Dangote. Dangote is doing 44 million litres of PMS on a daily basis.
“In contrast, NNPC is not refining PMS – they are only blending,” he added.
“Warri has a catalytic reforming unit, but Warri’s catalytic reforming unit is not functional.
“So, you can’t actually refine PMS. You can produce naphtha, but you can’t break it into higher distillates like PMS. The same thing applies in Port Harcourt.”
He added that data from the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA) supports his claims, showing that the state-run refineries are not producing petrol.
“What they were doing was they barge C5 raciness to the refinery, blend with NAFTA, condense it and call it PMS,” Emmanuel explained.
Emmanuel outlined the production capacities of Nigeria’s major refineries – Port Harcourt (60,000 and 150,000 barrels per day in the old and new units, respectively), Warri (125,000), and Kaduna (110,000) – but insisted none of them is actively refining PMS.
He noted that Kaduna Refinery has two Crude Distillation Units (CDUs), CDU1 and CDU2, with capacities of 50,000 and 60,000 barrels per day, respectively. Despite this, refining remains at a standstill.
“The government-owned refineries are not doing what they are supposed to do,” he stated.
Beyond refining capacity, Emmanuel criticised the Federal Government for lacking a proper hydrocarbon accounting framework. This, he argued, has led to a gross underestimation or outright misreporting of crude oil production volumes and revenue allocation.
“I’ll say that the Nigerian Government today does not have an accurate estimate of the amount of crude oil that comes to surface,
“Nigeria is one of the few crude oil-producing countries in the world without a hydrocarbon accounting framework.”
He explained that such a framework would allow agencies like the Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Petroleum Resources to independently verify production volumes and government entitlements in real-time.
Emmanuel referenced the controversial $450 million raised by a firm licensed to operate in Nigeria, which was given crude oil by the NNPC as an upfront payment to fund refinery maintenance.
He questioned the logic behind investing heavily in turnaround maintenance rather than building a new refinery altogether.
According to him, the money approved by the Federal Executive Council (FEC) in 2021 for turnaround maintenance was enough to build a brand-new refinery.
The Dangote Refinery has started importing crude oil to meet its refining requirement as it has since commenced the export of refined petroleum products.
By this development it will become clearer to the world that the huge resources invested in the endless maintenance of the idle refineries would have gone into the drains. It is doubtful if the present government would continue in the endless maintenance of the refineries which has been a goldmine for top government officials.
As one industry analyst put it, “the refineries have not been working. What we have seen is a pattern of public deception, financial mismanagement and media manipulation.”
The Senate is yet to publish the report of its special committee constituted on October 24, 2023 to investigate all the contracts awarded for the rehabilitation of all state-owned refineries said to have gulped N11.35 trillion in 13 years.
Sam Diala is a Bloomberg Certified Financial Journalist with over a decade of experience in reporting Business and Economy. He is Business Editor at THEWILL Newspaper, and believes that work, not wishes, creates wealth.
