Port Harcourt Refinery Operational, Trucking Out Products Daily, Says Facility’s MD

•NSChE president, Ogbuigwe, backs NNPC, insists refinery churning out fuels

Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja and Blessing Ibunge in Port Harcourt

The Managing Director of the Port Harcourt Refining Company Limited (PHRC), Ibrahim Onoja yesterday dismissed an allegation that production at the refinery was halted, after it was inaugurated Tuesday last week.

The Group Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC), Mele Kyari, had flagged off the rehabilitated plant at the Area 5 terminal of the refinery, with the national oil company saying that about 200 trucks would be loading out from the plant on a daily basis.

However, the joy that accompanied the event appeared to have been short-lived when some individuals and groups started insinuating that supply at the plant had been halted and facility shutdown, alleging that the resumption of activities was staged-managed.

But during a tour of the facility alongside journalists in Eleme, Rivers State, it was observed that trucking was ongoing at the loading bay with over 10 trucks positioned to evacuate products from the facility.

THISDAY also observed that at the Old PHRC Area 5 process plant, there was an extensive rehabilitation and upgrade of facility, with refining also ongoing. Onoja who led journalists on the tour, explained that “the plant is running and trucking out products”.

Also, the Terminal Manager at the Port Harcourt depot, Molokwuu Joel, told journalists that activities were going on at the facility, stressing that in less than 15 minutes, the loading bay was able to truck-out three 45,000-litre tankers.

He said: “This is PPMC loading arm. We have 11 loading bays that are functional, but because it has a huge capacity to deliver, we are using three at the moment.

“Out of the three loading bays, each one has the capacity of loading three trucks in 15 minutes. A truck is 45, 000 litres minimum. We have the ones of 60, 000 litres. Already, we have loaded more than 10 trucks. So before the close of work today (Sunday), just in the next one hour, we are going to evacuate minimum of 15 trucks.”

Molokwuu revealed that there were surplus products available, explaining that the petroleum marketers had been contacted to access the facility for quality products.

“We have our loading arms operational and we have been begging them (petroleum marketers) to come in since yesterday but because today is weekend that is why they have not turned up. If you give us 100 trucks today we will evacuate them in less than 5 hours.

“So it is not our problem if there are no loading trucks, it is the tanker drivers’ problem. We have been begging them since yesterday to come around and take the products but they didn’t turn up, it was just this morning after pleading with them that they came,” Molokwuu revealed.

Explaining further, the Executive Director, Operations, of the Nigeria Pipelines and Storage Company Limited, Moyi Maidunama, said:  “As you are seeing here, you are witnessing the truck load-out, we have been doing this since morning.

“We are evacuating the refined products from the refinery and this is obviously going to be a continuous process. We have done a couple of trucks today and intend to do many more today.”

Maidunama said operations were not halted, stressing that: “It was actually reduced due to some improvements that we needed to make and we have been able to do very much.

Maidunama added: Though there is a lot more than we can do in terms of getting more loading arms operational, but we are managing due to the number of trucks they we have available today. So we are using a few loading arms to execute the number of trucks we have today.”

The Chief Security Officer of Alesa Eleme, Dibia Isaiah, who dismissed some negative reports on the state of the refinery stressed: “Everybody is seeing it live and direct that production is on. I suspect it was the enemy of this rehabilitation that is going that is peddling the rumours.

“I am one of the leaders from the host community, I have loaded four trucks this morning. Now, we are loading tomorrow, there is no time we will not load. This time is a very busy period us. I wonder how people are giving out fake information just to run down the management. It is not good. I want to urge Nigerians to disregard such rumours”.

Also yesterday, the National President of the Nigerian Society of Chemical Engineers (NSChE), Tony Ogbuigwe, maintained that the refinery was indeed up and running, and is refining petroleum products.

Speaking in an interview with Arise News, he explained that although it was not yet fully on stream, the NNPC was working hard to ramp up the production capacity of the facility.

“The truth of the matter is that the Port Harcourt refinery, the area 5 of Port-Harcourt refinery is running…The old refinery is the one that has been brought back into operation. It is running, we can confirm that it is running,” he stressed.

He argued that the refinery will ramp up production in stages, explaining that since the plant was re-commissioned, he was surprised that people were saying that no loading had taken place.

He added: “Every refinery does blending everyday. In the refinery, we produce these product which are not the products you see outside. We produce LPG, we produce light naphtha, we produce heavy naphtha, we produce kerosene, we produce light gas oil, we produce heavy gas oil, we produce atmospheric residue. These are going into the storage tanks in every refinery.

“Then from those storage tanks, you’ll now start blending for the public, because these things I’ve mentioned now are not the things that the public consumes. The public consumes PMS (petrol),” he emphasised.

But Ogbuigwe said he was  looking forward to when the catalytic reforming unit will be brought into operation so that the refinery can fully optimise the crude oil that it is processing.

On pricing of products, he argued that this will be determined by production costs, stressing that there is already a template which is used to arrive at the price of refined fuels.