The Nigerian National Petroleum
Corporation (NNPC) officially announced on Wednesday that it has restarted the
Port Harcourt refinery, even as the refinery now produces up to five million
litres of petrol daily since it came back on stream last week.
In a bid to put a final end to fuel shortages in the
country, the Port Harcourt Refinery, which was shut down some months back, was
re-opened, a spokesman for state oil firm NNPC said.
“It is not in full capacity. Production is between
three and five million litres daily,” the Group General Manager, Public Affairs
of the NNPC, Garuba Deen Muhammad said.
The announcement was made during a monitoring exercise
of petrol distribution and sales at filling stations within Abuja and its
environs.
The spokesperson said: “Port Harcourt has been
refining for quite a while now, from last week, between three and five million
litres. We expect Kaduna refinery to begin any time soon and we also have
vessels discharging fuel and so, all these combined measures will bring down
the situation.”
“When you have this kind of
situation, people will naturally get agitated but people are getting calm now
because they know the supply gap has now been bridged, and it is a question of
distribution now. They are all patient and that was what happened in Lagos. The
situation has virtually normalised in Lagos because the motorists cooperated.
“Still, there are some hitches
here and there but improvement is what we are counting on and it is what we
should be expecting.
“People always take advantage of
situations and now we hear taxi drivers now take advantage of the situation and
find it more profitable to join queues and round trip to sell to black market
operators than doing their business. We will need to devise means of stopping
people from diverting and round tripping.”
The corporation also added that it expects its other
refinery located in Kaduna to come back on stream next week.
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