Nigeria to start selling refineries this year

One of Nigeria’s four refineries may be sold before the end of this year following President Olusegun Obasanjo's directive to the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) to accelerate the process of privatising the refineries. A senior official in the Presidency who confirmed the fresh directive given BPE said the calculation was that if one or two of the refineries could be privatised this year, the remaining ones would be left for next year.
About N 13.3 bn had been committed on the turn around maintenance (TAM) of the nations' four refineries since 1999, and none is functioning at the optimal capacity, a development that has made the country to depend on importation of refined petroleum products to meet demand of local consumption. BPE will soon unveil a comprehensive time table on the privatisation of refineries as its Director on oil and gas is said to be working round the clock to get it out.

The draft report of national oil and gas policy prepared for BPE by Nexant which was deliberated upon a fortnight ago in Abuja by the sector's stakeholders, recommended the privatisation of the refineries. The refineries, according to the report, should ideally be separately privatised and encouraged to compete with one another and with imported commodity under the supervision of anti-monopoly regulator.
Nexant, a UK based expert on oil and gas in the report observed it did not believe it would be in Nigeria's best interest to encourage the construction of more refineries suggesting" it would be better to sell the existing refineries to separate owners. It should be noted that it will take the refineries some years to reach world class standard of operation and appropriate strategies need to be designed for this" the report observed. It however suggested that subject to technical organisation, importers should be free to import petroleum products and compete with refineries.

Meanwhile, oil workers issued a fresh ultimatum on the maintenance of the refineries to the federal government, warning thatthe nations' refineries must be fixed into shape by December 31.
At a joint meeting of National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) and Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN) in Benin, the body also warned against any further increase in the pump price of petroleum product.