NNPC Promises To Supply 20000bpd Of Crude To Lagos

Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has promised to supply 20,000bpd of crude oil to Lagos.

Gatekeeper News reports that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation(NNPC) has pledged to supply crude oil with a capacity of 20,000 barrels per day to a refinery project on Tomaro Island in Lagos, Southwest Nigeria.

The promoters of the Eko Petrochem, and Refining Company, Integrated Oil & Gas Limited, made this known on Saturday, adding that it had spent over $20m on the project.

The Chairman/Chief Executive Officer, Integrated Oil & Gas Limited, Emmanuel Iheanacho, said this during a visit by the delegation from the Ministry of Petroleum Resources to the project site.

The delegation, led by the Director, Upstream at the ministry, Busari Kamoru, visited the company to confirm the progress made so far on the project and the challenges facing it.

Iheanacho who said it would cost $200m to build, stated that the company got a grant of $797,343 in 2017 from the United States Trade and Development Agency for the project.

According to him, “We have worked very hard; it has been much harder than we thought it could be in terms of the time that it has taken and the resources that we have had to commit to it,”

Iheanacho said when the company started the project, a bankable feasibility proposal was articulated. The company afterward, went ahead to do the front-end engineering, noting that the detailed engineering was done recently.

He said, “In terms of licensing, we started with the Licence to Establish, and then we have now got the Authority to Construct. Now, we are at a point where we are talking to potential investors, and we have sent out invitation-to-tender documents to a number of world-class engineering, procurement, and construction companies.

“We are hoping that sometime in the middle of June, we will get their responses. At that point, we will then sit down and look at who will give us the best mix of price, quality, and proposition.

Iheanacho added the company applied to the NNPC for crude oil supply when it started the project.

According to him, “They looked at the proposition we put before them, and they gave us a guarantee to supply a certain proportion of the feedstock that we require. But that does not stop us from also making arrangements with other third-party traders in oil, and we are also actively talking to those people.”

Meanwhile, an event consulting firm, Jake Riley, said the NNPC condensate refinery programme targeting the continuous supply of feedstock to mini refineries is expected to gain traction in the coming months.

Jake Riley, revealed this during the recently concluded Nigerian Oil and Gas Opportunity Fair.

It added that as modular refineries were springing up in different parts of the country, the programme broke the jinx that held 40 out of the 44 active licensees back as of 2018 from translating their licenses into actual projects.

The Managing Director, Jake Riley, Funmi Ogbue, said, “We need the Petroleum Industry Bill now more than ever before. The prolonged period of uncertainty is dampening the enthusiasm of prospective investors with interests in Nigeria.”