Port Harcourt refinery restarts as Forcados remains shut till June

The Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) on Wednesday said that it had restarted the Port Harcourt refinery, which has a capacity of 210,000 barrels a day. This comes on the heel of reports which note that repair works on Nigeria’s sabotaged Forcados oil pipeline will not be completed until June, 2016.

 

“It is not in full capacity. Production is between three and five million litres daily,” NNPC spokesman Garba Deen Muhammad said.

 

NNPC said this month it planned to restart its 110,000-barrel-per-day refinery in the northern city of Kaduna by mid-April.

 

Nigeria has a refining capacity of 445,000 barrels per day from three refinery companies but they have been mostly shut due to years of neglect and corruption.

 

Last month, Minister of State for Petroleum Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu said Nigeria was in talks with oil companies Chevron, Total and ENI seeking help to revamp the ailing refineries.

 

Meanwhile, repair work on the pipeline feeding Nigeria’s Forcados crude oil to the export terminal is expected to take until June, sources familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

 

The grade, which was scheduled to export some 249,000 barrels per day of oil in February and March, has been under force majeure since Feb. 21, a week after a pipeline leak forced a halt to loadings to the export platform.

 

No export programmes were issued for April or May. Shell , whose local affiliate SPDC operates the pipeline, said it could not comment on the timeline of repair work.

 

Local producers had to shut Forcados crude output as a result of the pipeline closure, and sources said it is likely to take some time once the pipeline is repaired to resume oil production and exports.

 

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