At last Portharcourt refinery rolls out & loads 200 trucks of petroleum products five years after shutdown
PortHarcourt Refinery and Petrochemical Company has rolled out it’s first petroleum products and loaded about 200 trucks of petroleum products following its commencement of operations on Tuesday, Agenda Papers can authoritatively report.
Agenda Papers had earlier reported that the refinery, which had not been active since 2019, officially commenced operations after undergoing renovation and modernisation.
The renovation and modernisation project commenced in 2021 after the federal government secured a $1.5bn contract to rehabilitate the facility.
The first trucks of petroleum products will be lifted from the facility on Tuesday under the supervision of the Group Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL), Mallam Mele Kyari, who toured the facility on Monday night.
It was learnt that about one million litres of petroluem products would be loaded on Tuesday from the refinery, which represents about 42 trucks.
The refined products that would be lifted from the facility include petrol, diesel, and kerosene, among others.
The refinery, located in the oil-rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria, started operations in1965.
It is the oldest and the biggest of the three government-owned oil refining sites in Nigeria.
The facility consists of a 60,000 barrels per day old refinery that started operations in 1965 and a 150,000bpd new refinery that came on stream in 1989.
Despite having a combined crude processing capacity of 210,000bpd, the Port Harcourt refinery, like other state refineries of the country, has been operating only at a fraction of its capacity over the last few decades due to process inefficiency and lack of maintenance.
This has led to the growing reliance of Nigeria, Africa’s largest crude producer, on imports of refined petroleum products.
The rehabilitation project, being undertaken in three phases, is expected to be completed by 2025. But the first phase of the project, which is the mechanical completion phase, was done by NNPC Ltd in December last year.
The new Port Harcourt refinery comprises a Crude Distillation Unit (CDU), a Vacuum Distillation Unit (VDU), a Naphtha Hydrotreating Unit (NHTU), a Catalytic Reforming Unit (CRU), a Continuous Catalyst Regeneration (CCR) Unit, a kerosene hydrotreating unit, a fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) unit, and a dimersol unit to convert propylene into a gasoline blendstock.
It also houses a butamer isomerisation unit, an alkylation unit, apart from hydrogen purification, fuel gas vaporiser, sour water, and caustic treatment units.
The old refinery comprises a CDU, a CRU, and a liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) facility.
The refinery complex uses four turbo-generators of 14MW an hour of electricity generation capacity each and four boilers of 120 tonnes (t) an hour of steam generation capacity each.
