By Augustine Okezie
The managing director of Port Harcourt Refining Company (PHRC), Dr Bafred Enjugu has called for the use of local contractors in carrying out the turnaround maintenance (TAM) of the nation’s refineries.
Dr Enjugu who was presenting a paper titled: ‘’Consolidating local refining Capacity: Resolving the Turnaround Maintenance Question’’, at the recently organised NNPC workshop for Energy correspondents held in Uyo, Akwa Ibom state said since the Original Refining Builders (ORB),have refused to come to Nigeria to carry out their routine check on the refineries ,citing security reasons, it therefore behooves on the Nigerian government to immediately encourage indigenous contractors ,most of whom have foreign technical partners in the fold, to carry out the TAM.
Blueprint investigation at the workshop gathered that the Japanese firm that built the Port Harcourt refinery and Petrochemical Company relied on evidence aggregated by a security tracking device to reject the invitation by the federal government to conduct a comprehensive turnaround maintenance (TAM) last undertaken in 1992.
The device called Nigerian Security Tracker (NST) is said to be “a product of the United States Council on Foreign Relations’’, it was deployed in the mapping of violence prone areas in Nigeria.
Currently, the militant Islamist movement Boko Haram is active in northern Nigeria while other forms of violence still persist among ethnic groups, farmers, and herdsmen sometimes acquiring religious overtones.
Dr Bafred Audu Enjugu explained the Japanese firm refused to come over to the Niger Delta for fear of security concerns.
“The commercial negotiation with the original builder of the PHRC was very long and the conclusions remain unacceptable to the NNPC,” Enjugu stated, adding that the labour costs with foreign patronage were prohibitive and outran all budget provisions by the NNPC.
Enjugu, however, told his audience that NNPC had resolved to give Nigerian engineers a chance to exercise their skills by embarking on selective maintenance of portions of the refinery at a time working with local expertise without shutting down the entire refinery as was the practice during TAM in the past. He assured that the PHRC was currently operating at a about 50 per cent of name-plate capacity.
On the present refining capacities of the three functional refineries in the country, Dr Enjugu noted that though the refineries have installed capacities of 60%, they are producing below the percentage. He said that PHRC is presently producing at 47%.
The PHRC boss further lamented that most refining companies are currently finding difficult to meet up with production volume due to constraints in encountered in crude oil supply.
