Nigeria can stop the importation of refined petroleum products in 18 months if the Federal Government works with their plans, local refineries owners in Nigeria, including the Dangote Petroleum Refinery have hinted.
Speaking under the aegis of the Crude Oil Refiners Association of Nigeria, the refiners said beyond the completed 650,000-capacity Dangote Petroleum Refinery, there are other refineries at different stages of completion.
While granting an interview to a newspaper correspondent, CORAN Publicity Secretary, Eche Idoko, boasted that the Dangote refinery and others in the country can satisfy the fuel needs of the nation.
Responding to the comment of the Chief Executive of the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Regulatory Authority, Farouk Ahmed that the country would not stop fuel importation to break the Dangote monopoly and ensure energy security, the CORAN official said, “You can’t tackle inflation if you don’t address the pump price of petroleum products. You cannot say you have a plan to step down inflation and you are not involving the key sectors like the refineries; you have to involve us, let’s work together.
“And CORAN is saying that, in 18 months, if the Nigerian government will work with our programmes and plans, in 18 months, we can stop the importation of petroleum products completely. There are refineries in different stages of completion. In 18 months, we can produce what Nigeria will consume.”
He noted that Nigeria has “the crude oil to feed these refineries and more fields are being licensed by the day. So, there will be crude to feed the refineries. Our production figure is dropping because of the crude that is being stolen daily.
“When we have local refineries, crude theft will be reduced. People steal crude through the pipelines and most of the refineries are located close to some of these fields. What this does is that the crude oil producers will no longer need to pump their crude through the pipelines to the terminal for export.
“The local refineries will just truck from the fields or get a short pipeline or barge from their fields to these places. We are losing heavily because unscrupulous elements are stealing crude from the long pipelines,” Idoko stated.
While appealing to the Federal Government to ensure that crude oil is sold in naira and not dollars, saying this would reduce the cost of fuel production and the pressure on the local currency, he mentioned that ending the importation of fuel would strengthen the naira against the dollar, asking that the IOCs should start selling fuel directly to local refiners instead of referring them to their trading agents in Europe.
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