SAN FRANCISCO, January 20, (THEWILL) – The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has announced the “operational shutdown” of the Port Harcourt and Kaduna refineries due to crude supply challenges arising from recent attacks on oil pipelines.
This was announced in a statement released by the Group General Manager, Ohi Alegbe, who said that the plants were shut simultaneously on Sunday after attacks on the Bonny-Okrika crude supply line to the Port Harcourt Refinery and the Escravos-Warri crude supply line to the Kaduna Refinery.
He further revealed that before the closure, the Port Harcourt Refinery was recording a daily PMS yield of over 4.1 million litres while Kaduna Refinery was posting a daily petrol production of about 1.3 million litres.
“The Warri Refining and Petrochemicals Company, WRPC is still on stream and producing a little above 1.4 million Litres of petrol per day,” Alegbe said.
He also assured that NNPC had put strategies in place to guarantee unimpeded country-wide availability of petroleum products despite the closure of the refineries.
“In response to the unexpected setback, we have activated comprehensive remedial measures to sustain the prevailing stability in the supply and distribution of petroleum products across the country,” he said.
Before the closure, the Port Harcourt refinery was producing about 4.09 million litres of petrol daily, while the Kaduna refinery was producing about 1.29 million litres of petrol daily.
