Kaduna refinery loses N18.6b, idle for 7 months

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has said the Kaduna Refinery and Petrochemical Company accrued loss totalling N18.67 billion in seven months this year as it was idle for the same period.

According to the monthly report prepared by NNPC, the refinery lost N3.81bn in February, N2.63bn in March, N4.22bn in May, N2.98bn in June, N2.35bn in July, and N2.68bn in August, but made a profit of N2.96bn in April.

There are four refineries in the country with two in Port Harcourt and one each in Kaduna and Warri, with an installed capacity of 445,000 barrels per day.

The refineries have over the years performed far below installed capacity, resulting in huge imports of refined petroleum products into the country.

The refineries, according to the report, lost a total of N68.12bn in the first half of this year, making a profit of N928.81m in April, for the first time in 10 months.

Total crude processed by the refineries in August was 56,804 metric tonnes as against the 90,872MT processed in the preceding month, translating to a combined yield efficiency of 80.74 per cent as against the 73.82 per cent in July.

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According to the NNPC, only Warri and Port Harcourt refineries produced 53,881MT of finished petroleum products and 8,017MT of intermediate products out of the 56,804MT of crude processed at a combined capacity utilisation of 3.02 per cent, compared to 4.83 per cent combined capacity utilisation achieved in July.

“The lower operational performance recorded is attributable to the ongoing revamping of the refineries which is expected to further enhance capacity utilisation once completed,” the corporation added.

The corporation also said it had been adopting a merchant plant refineries business model since January 2017.

It said: “The model takes cognisance of the products worth and crude costs. The combined value of output by the three refineries (at import parity price) for the month of August 2018 amounted to N8.67bn while the associated crude plus freight costs and operational expenses were N9.78bn and N9.68bn respectively.”

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