Minister Kachikwu re-inaugurated the supply line at the Port Harcourt Refining Company on Saturday, April 23. He said Nigeria is looking for investors, as $700 million are required for upgrading the national refineries in order to ensure they maximise their output. Nowadays the refineries are working at 60% capacity.
The minister reminded explained that the federal government recovered the two critical crude supply pipelines: Escravos-Warri and Port Harcourt/Bonny.
Kachikwu said that the pipelines were down for six to seven years. Now they have resumed operation and are supplying crude to the refineries.
“Port Harcourt is back in production, Warri is back in production; Kaduna today is receiving and will soon be back in production. It is something of joy,” the minister said, as quoted by the NAN.
“Lagos is easing off now from fuel scarcity and Abuja is doing the same thing; once Kaduna begins to produce, the North will see a lot of improvement.”
Kachikwu apologised to Nigerians for their suffering due to the fuel scarcity and thanked them for their patience:
“We owe Nigerians the duty to ensure that the refineries are working. We owe Nigerians that, we can’t give up.”
He urged the compatriots to support what the Buhari administration is doing because, in his opinion, “this is the only way to change the system”.
It would be recalled that the minister has recently recommisioned Warri refinery and pipelines with daily output of two million litres of petrol.
Nigerians are consuming about 45 million litres of petrol per day. The estimated current output of refineries is 12 million litres daily. Once upgraded refineries reach the production level of 90%, about 20 million litres would be produced and delivered to consumers every day.
However, with such production, it would only meet up with about half of the country’s demand.
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