Foreign investors seek opportunities in $450m Tomaro Industrial Park
There are indications that investors from China and Europe have expressed intention to buy into the vision and goals of the promoter of the $450 million Tomaro Industrial Park and Free Trade Zone, by seeking out possible investment opportunities in the zone.
Tomaro Island, which was officially granted a Free Trade Zone (FTZ) status in 2017 by the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari, is an industrial zone with a number of investments covering the oil and maritime sectors, especially in the areas like ship building yard, strategic oil tank farm, 20,000 barrel per day modular refinery and hotels.
The FTZ will be designed on the Western side to attract people who will be into manufacturing; they can bring in raw materials, manufacture and export outside Nigeria without paying duty and can only pay duty, if they export into Nigeria.
“There are investors, who were in discussion with us and they want to buy into the vision that we have in Tomaro. When the American government gave us the grant, investors mostly Chinese and Europeans sent in letters of intent to do business with us but at that time we were not keen because we were still trying to get all our approvals in place and sorting out other issues,” Emmanuel Ihenacho, chairman of Integrated Oil and Gas, said last week when the officers of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), paid an inspection visit to the Island.
As the owners of the Free Zone, Ihenacho said that, they are ready to go back to those proposals and give them the necessary attention required.
According to him, getting the needed expertise in executing the proposed projects in the Island would not be an issue, because the company can get the persons that have skills needed to execute their projects.
BusinessDay understands that the United State Government through the United States Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) gave the promoter of Tomaro project, the sum of $797,343 from its Industrial Development Grant.
The grant was said to be specifically used to finance the detailed analysis of supporting technologies and engineering for the implementation of the 20,000bpd crude oil refinery in the Tomaro FTZ.
“Free Zones have their area of specialties. Some have facility for integrating Floating, Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO), but in Tomaro, we want to build a slipway for our ship building yard as well as modular refinery. The yard will build and repair ships, starting from smaller vessels to building bigger ones in the future. We are doing this because Nigeria has, for a very long time wanted to be a builder of ships but no facility has succeeded,” Ihenacho said.
On why Tomaro is investing in refinery, Ihenacho said that Nigeria needs a lot of modular refineries to be sufficient in refining petroleum products for domestic use. The benefit of building our own refinery is unimaginable because it will help to cut down the cost of transporting the crude to refineries abroad and the transport to bring the refined products back into the country.
“For instance, USA has developed lots of small scale refineries. They have about 60 modular refineries in Texas alone, which is just one state in USA. The idea is to become self-sufficient instead of exporting crude to other countries and losing jobs to those countries.
“So, if we are able to cut transport cost, the pump price of refined products would be cheaper. In building refineries, Nigeria will become a hub for selling refined oil instead of selling crude. This means that Nigeria’s economy will expand by attracting greater benefits,” he added.
So far, construction has commenced at the Eastern side of the industrial park, where investment in the building of 30 strategic storage and product supply tank farms, will be located.
The tank farm project consists of 30 tank bases with storage capacity of 500 million liters of fuel. Given the capacity, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), will be able to draw fuel for 15 days from the facility when there is ups and down in fuel supply in Nigeria.
According to Ihenacho, the on-going industrialisation in the free zone will create job opportunities for people and cause technology transfer for Nigerian engineers. “However, in the next nine months, there would be a project that would be worth commissioning in Tomaro Industrial Park.
Aside from building an integration yard to enable the construction of oil facilities like the FPSO, Ihenacho said the Island will in the future, become the operational base of an aviation firm known as ‘Genesis Aviation,’ which is housed in a lease facility in Ikeja, but expects to build a hanger in the Island for its helicopters.
The Free Zone will also have about three to five star hotels for the International Oil Companies operating in the Island to house their staff before airlifting them to their various offshore bases. It will also have warehouses, plants, office and manufacturing facilities.
“The shipyard will have multiplier effects on the nation’s economy because it will involve ship building, bringing revenue to the steel and oil industries. The best thing that we would have wanted was to develop our steel industry by having Ajaokuta functioning, but in the meantime, we can make do with importing the steel required to make the ship building yard operational,” he explained.
Commenting, Eloho Francis, senior manager of the Nigeria Export Processing Zone (NEPZA), who described facilities in Tomaro Island as big move for Nigeria especially judging by what the modular refinery and tank farm facilities will offer to the nation’s economy, said the facility will become a hub for fuel manufacturing and distribution.
She said that the Free Zone would not only help to address the reoccurring issue of fuel scarcity in Nigeria but also become a success that would bring investment into Nigeria.
Uzoamaka Anagor-Ewuzie