'New refineries will not be sold' - NNPC boss assures

The Group Managing Director of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Dr Ibe Kachikwu, has assured Nigerians that the Port Harcourt and the Okrika Jetty refineries would not be sold.

This is contained in a press statement signed by Ohi Alegbe, the corporation's Group General Manager, Group Public Affairs Division and made available to newsmen in Lagos.

He said that joint venture partners with established track records of success in refining would be invited to support the running of the refineries in order to ensure efficiency.

According to him, efforts are in top gear to fix all the crude and petroleum products pipelines across the country.

"The Nigerian Airforce will be engaged to provide aerial survey of the pipelines, the Nigerian Army Engineering corps to fix and police the pipelines while Nigerian Navy would provide marine surveillance for the network of pipelines.

According to the statement, Kachikwu made this disclosure during an official tour of the Okrika Jetty and the Port Harcourt Refining Company Limited on Wednesday, September 2.

The statement said that he said that the PPMC would be split into pipelines company that would focus primarily on the maintenance of the over five thousand kilometers pipelines of the corporation

It stated there would be a storage company that would maintain the over 23 depots and a products marketing company that would market and sell petroleum products.

Kachikwu said that the move would ensure that the right set of skills are rightly positioned and the number of leakages in terms of pipelines break and products loss are reduced to the barest minimum.

The GMD said that the ongoing phased rehabilitation of all the state owned refineries would be given an accelerated vigour with the aim of reducing petroleum products importation into the country.

He added that at full capacity, all the refineries could supply only 20 million litres of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) otherwise known as petrol on a daily basis.

The GMD commended the NNPC’s Engineers for the successful execution of the ongoing phased rehabilitation of the refineries.

He urged them to prepare a replacement programmes for obsolete spare parts of all the Corporation’s installations in order to avoid intermittent shut down of facilities.

The statement also stated that Dr Barred Enjugu, the Managing Director of the PHRC, said the ongoing phased rehabilitation of the company cost a little less than 10 million dollars.

According to Enjugu, the job was holistically carried out by indigenous engineers without any foreign support.

It further stated that the Managing Director of PPMC, Esther Namdi-Ogbue assured the GMD that the company would ``think outside the box'' to provide solutions to all the challenges confronting the company.