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NNPC’s Port Harcourt Refinery Company nets N11.2bn profit

By BusinessNews Staff on January 17, 2015

The Port Harcourt Refining Company (PHRC), a subsidiary of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), has announced a record net profit of N11.2 billion for last December, representing N8.2 billion or 250 per cent above the N3.2 billion posted by the company in preceding November 2014.

The Managing Director of the company, Dr. Bafred Enjugu, who disclosed this in a statement on Thursday, attributed the improved financial performance to the phased rehabilitation programme and resumption of crude supply to the plants.

Enjugu said the company had also mapped out measures to harness various business opportunities available to it through plans by its commercial department to rake in additional N182 billion annually from sales of deregulated products including Liquefied petroleum Gas (LPG), Automotive Gas Oil (AGO) and other derivatives.

He said the development was a dividend of the ongoing phased rehabilitation of the company’s plant facilities and receipt of crude by marine vessels.

According to him, pipeline vandalism on its 54 kilometre crude line from Shell facility in Bonny made it near impossible for the refinery to function until the intervention of President Goodluck Jonathan, through the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Mrs. Diezani Allison Madueke, who approved receipt of crude by the refinery through marine vessels.

He said Alison-Madueke also resolved the age-long problem of power supply to run the facilities at the refinery.

According to him, under the power supply arrangement, private player in the electric power sector, Gel Utilities Limited, now provides electricity to run the refinery from its recently commissioned generation plants.

He said with the various measures activated to enhance the operations of the company, the company has started making meaningful contribution to the nation’s petroleum products pool.

Such developments, according to him, would not only bring in more income for the refinery but will also help solve constrains which sometimes lead to shut down of its processing units.

Enjugu said the decision of the federal government to supply crude to the refinery by marine transportation; the supply of power by IPP, and approval for a new strategy of using in-house skills for a phased rehabilitation have contributed to the recent increase in production and plant availability.

Enjugu stated that the NNPC resorted to the new strategy of phased rehabilitation using in-house staff and local capacities when the Original Refinery Builders (ORB), the JGC of Japan, refused to come to the country for the job, citing security concerns.

The use of in-house personnel in rehabilitation of the refinery, he pointed out, also falls in line with the Nigerian Content Development Act in the petroleum sector.
Enjugu said the JGC had nominated their technical partner, Technimont of Italy, who did not only come up with outrageous charges but declined to give performance guarantees.

The development, he said, had provided opportunity to NNPC to think deeper and look inwards for the skills and knowledge requirements for the rehabilitation.
The phased rehabilitation will be executed in manageable bits over a period of 18 months from October 2014, he stated.

PHRC forms part of the three refineries of NNPC, which collectively have the capacity to process some 445, 000 barrels of crude oil per day, with the twin plants in PHRC hosting about half of the Nigerian domestic refining capacity, accounting for 47.8 per cent of the total.

[ThisDay]

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