Port Harcourt Refinery To Begin Production This Week

The New Port Harcourt Refining Company, PHRC 2, will this week begin full production of Premium Motor Spirit, PMS, known in popular parlance as petrol.

Chairman of the Chrome Group, Sir Emeka Offor, made this known after the complete rehabilitation of Area 3, where petrol, Liquefied Petroleum Gas, LPG, and other lighter products are produced.

Speaking further, Offor said the refinery will reduce fuel importation by 40% when it commences full operation at 210,000 barrels per day.

Still on the refinery, which began producing Dual Purpose Kerosene (DPK) and Automotive Gas (diesel) last month, Offor said since 2000 when his Chrome Consortium began the Turn Around Maintenance (TAM) of the refinery, the company had stayed back to lead the consortium to provide massive maintenance due to the large success of the TAM, a process certified by Shell Manufacturing Services.

While disclosing that his company had also done intervention jobs at the on the Kaduna refinery, he decried the lack of of supply of crude oil, brought about by vandalism as the reason for the collapse of the refinery

He said: “Vandalism would have caused part of these problems. If the refineries are not getting crude oil, may be, that is the reason the government did not deem it fit to make funds available for TAM. I know that TAM is very expensive. If you finish TAM and you don’t get crude to run the refinery, it is not economical. The two factors are that the refineries must get feed, and which means that we must make sure that the issue of vandalism is stopped.

“If the issue of vandalism is stopped, then we can hold government to monitor the pipelines. But Nigerians have to be educated too. In other countries, they have refineries, pipelines and cables and you don’t go to the United States or London or even in the Eastern Europe to cut pipelines. We have to talk to our people; if these two problems that go together are resolved, the refineries will work well”