Port Harcourt Refinery Rolls Out First Petroleum Products in Years

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Port Harcourt refinery on Tuesday began the evacuation of fuel and other refined products after many years of being in limbo.

Marketers of petroleum products and fuel consumers hailed as the first line of trucks drove into the loading bay attached to the refinery to load fuel.

An engineer working on the rehabilitation project confirmed this to TELL. He said that loading of fuel from the refinery has started with Melee Kyari, the CEO of Nigeria National Petroleum Company Limited, NNPCL supervising.

TELL could not confirm, however, if the products from the Port Harcourt refinery will affect the general price of petrol. Prices of fuel remained between ₦1120 and ₦1180 in different filling stations in Port Harcourt and Akwa Ibom.

One of the people working in the plant who did not want his name to be mentioned told the magazine that the products being evacuated were the ones produced during the staccato test runs that have been taking place with the old refinery.

Operations of the old Port Harcourt refinery have been off and on after it was mechanically commissioned in December 2023.

The rehabilitation of the old refinery first inaugurated 60 years ago was part of a comprehensive turnaround maintenance of the two Port Harcourt refineries whose contract was $1.5 billion and awarded in 2021. The old refinery rehabilitation was to be completed within two years. But it suffered setbacks when funding stopped flowing. The project even came to a halt before Nigeria’s new president, Bola Tinubu, gave a matching order for the project to be completed by August 2023. Efforts to meet the August 2023 deadline failed and what followed were new deadlines that ran monthly until December 2023 when the Minister of State (Oil), Heineken Lokpobiri, visited Port Harcourt 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. TELL 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 is largely imported.