The combined installed capacity utilisation of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation’s refi neries located in Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna increased by 29 percentage points in January 2017 compared with their performance in December 2016. Th is was disclosed by NNPC’s Group General Manager, Group Public Aff airs Division, Mr. Ndu Ughamadu in a statement.
He said in NNPC’s latest Mo n t h l y Fi n a n c i a l a n d Operations Report for January released in Abuja, NNPC the corporation capacity utilisation of the refi neries rose to 36.73 percent in January 2017, as against 7.55 percent in the previous month of December 2016. U g h a m a d u e x p l a i n e d that the report attributed the improvement to the implementation of the 12 Business Focus Areas, BUFAS, strategy introduced by the Group Managing Director, Dr. Maikanti Baru.
According to the report, the refineries benefitted from the introduction of a new Refi neries Business Model under the 12 BUFAS strategy which has transformed them from “tolling plants to merchant plants” thereby placing them on the path to profi tability. Th e Port Harcourt Refi ning Company (PHRC ) and Warri Refining and Petrochemical Company (WRPC) also posted surpluses of Five Billion, One Hundred and Fifteen Million Naira (N5,115,000,000) and Four Hundred and Four Million Naira (N404,000,000) respectively. Under the new refi nery model, each refi nery purchases crude oil at export parity price, processes and sells the corresponding products on its own account. “This is different from the previous Tolling Plant model where the refi nery does not take title to the crude, but rather charges a tolling/processing fee to the owner of the crude which was PPMC on behalf of the Corporation”, the report stated.
Apart from PHRC and WRPC, fi ve other subsidiaries of the Corporation also posted surpluses. These include the Nigerian Petroleum D e v e l o p m e n t C o m p a n y (NPDC), the Nigerian Gas Pipelines and Transport C o m p a n y ( N G P T C ) , NNPC Retail, the National Engineering, and Technical Company (NETCO), and the Integrated Data Services Ltd (IDSL). According to the document which is the 18th in the series of Monthly Financial and Operations Reports since the NNPC began publishing its business transactions, the Corporation recorded a Two Billion, Seven Hundred and Fifty Million Naira (N2.75billion) reduction in its trading defi cit in the period under review putting the total trading defi cit at N14.26billion. “Th is represents about 16.19 percent improvement compared to N17.01billion recorded in December 2016, in spite of the Corporation’s challenging situations which limit its aspiration to profi tability”, the report stated. It listed some of the factors that impeded the Corporation’s performance to include the production shutdown of the Trans Niger Pipeline and Nembe Creek Trunkline due to leakages; the shutdown of Agbami Terminal for a mini Turn-AroundMaintenance; and the subsisting Force Majeure declared by SPDC as a result of the vandalized 48-inch Forcados export line after its restoration in October 17, 2016.
