Refineries not for sale  – NNPC boss

moves to unbundle PPMC

In a bid to ensure lean, efficient and profitable operations, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) is to commence the unbundling of the Pipelines and Products Marketing Company Limited into three different companies.

Ibe Kachikwu, group managing director, NNPC, made this disclosure during an official tour of the Okrika Jetty and the Port Harcourt Refining Company Limited on Wednesday.

Kachikwu said the PPMC would be split into a pipelines company that would focus primarily on the maintenance of the over five thousand kilometres pipelines of the Corporation; a storage company that would maintain all the over 23 depots and a products marketing company that would market and sell petroleum products.

He said 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 were reduced to the barest minimum.

The GMD noted 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, adding that at full capacity, all the refineries could supply only 20 million litres of premium motor spirit, otherwise known as petrol, on a daily basis.

The NNPC boss affirmed that the refineries would not be sold but 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.

Efforts are in top gear to fix all the crude and petroleum products pipelines across the country, he said, stressing that the Nigerian Airforce would be engaged to provide aerial survey of the pipelines, the Nigerian Army Engineering corps to fix and police the pipelines and the Nigerian Navy to provide marine surveillance for the network of pipelines.

He commended the NNPC’s engineers for the successful execution of the ongoing phased rehabilitation of the refineries while urging 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.

Speaking in a similar vein, Bafred Audu Enjugu, managing director of the PHRC, said the ongoing phased rehabilitation of the company cost a little less than $10 million, adding that the job was holistically carried out by indigenous engineers without any foreign support.

On her part, Esther Namdi-Ogbue, managing director of PPMC, assured the GMD that the company would think outside the box to provide solutions to all the challenges confronting it.