African Refinery Appoints Honeywell UOP Process Licensor for New 100,000bpsd Refinery in Port Harcourt

Peter Uzoho

African Refinery Port Harcourt Limited (ARPHL) has signed a process licensing agreement with Honeywell UOP, a world-renowned process licensor for its 100,000 barrels-per-stream-day (bpsd) refinery in Port Harcourt, Rivers State.

The appointment of the process licensor followed the recent award of a contract to Italian company, Tecnimont SPA, for the development of the Front End Engineering Design (FEED) of the ARPHL’s deep conversion refinery to be collocated within the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited’s (NNPC) Port Harcourt Refinery in Eleme.

Honeywell UOP, formerly known as UOP LLC, is a leading American multi-national company that specialises in developing and delivering technology to the petroleum refining, gas processing, petrochemical production and major manufacturing industries.

The ARPHL in a statement issued yesterday, by its Managing Director, Omotayo Adebajo, stated that Honeywell UOP, under the agreement would deploy the technology needed for refining crude oil into petrol, diesel, kerosene, Jet-fuel, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and other products.

The company described the project as a joint venture partnership with NNPC Limited and was further to NNPC and the Nigerian government’s aim to reduce dependency on imported refined petroleum products by processing the nation’s crude oil locally for the domestic market.

Adebajo confirmed that with the appointment of UOP, the project would now proceed to engineering design implementation and selection of the Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) contractor.

He also assured that with the adoption of UOP’s patented process technology, the ARPHL JV with NNPC was guaranteed to be one of the most technologically advanced and state of the art refineries in Sub-Sahara Africa.