The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has announced the “operational shutdown” of the Port Harcourt and Kaduna refineries, owing to crude supply challenges arising from recent attacks on vital crude oil pipelines. According to Ohi Alegbe, group general manager of the corporation, who released a statement to announce the move, the plants were shut simultaneously on Sunday after the Bonny-Okrika crude supply line to the Port Harcourt Refinery and the Escravos-Warri crude supply line to the Kaduna Refinery suffered breaches. He stated that before the closure, the Port Harcourt Refinery was recording a daily PMS yield of over 4.1 million litres while Kaduna Refinery was posting a daily petrol production of about 1.3 million litres. “The Warri Refining and Petrochemicals Company, WRPC is still on stream and producing a little above 1.4 million Litres of petrol per day,” the statement said. However, NNPC assured that it had “put in place strategies to guarantee unimpeded country-wide availability of petroleum products”. “In response to the unexpected setback, we have activated comprehensive remedial measures to sustain the prevailing stability in the supply and distribution of petroleum products across the country,” NNPC added. The closure of the refineries comes 15 days after NNPC announced that the two of them, combined with the Warri refinery, attained a combined daily production of over 6.76 million litres of petrol per day. It even projected the figure to increase to over 10 million litres per day by the end of January. “While Port Harcourt refinery, which was re-streamed a week earlier, is producing some 4.09 million litres, the Kaduna refinery is contributing some 1.29 million litres and Warri, which was re-streamed on Sunday is posting a yield of some 1.38 million litres,” the corporation had said.
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