The Nigerian Nationwide Petroleum Firm Restricted has denied claims by an Alesa group chief in Rivers State that the Port Harcourt refinery isn’t but producing gasoline.
It could possibly be recalled that Timothy Mgbere, mentioned to be a frontrunner of Alesa had appeared on nationwide tv on Thursday to accuse the NNPCL of lying to Nigerians when it claimed the refinery is already processing crude oil.
In a press release on Friday, the NNPCL spokesperson, Olufemi Soneye, accused Mgbere of crass ignorance of how a refinery runs, saying he wouldn’t have dignified him with a response if not for a must set the data straight.
“He (Mgbere) claimed that the outdated Port Harcourt Refinery was solely working skeletally and was not processing PMS. His proof was that the PMS truck-out was accomplished on the gantry of the brand new Port Harcourt Refinery as in opposition to the gantry of the outdated Port Harcourt Refinery.
“This betrays his scant information of the operations of the refinery. The outdated and new Port Harcourt Refineries have since been built-in with one single terminal for product load-out.
“They share frequent utilities like energy and storage tanks. Which means storage tanks and loading gantry which he claimed belongs to the brand new Port-Harcourt Refinery also can obtain merchandise from the Previous Port Harcourt Refinery,” Soneye defined.
The NNPC Chief Communications Officer famous that Mgbere contradicted himself by saying that the PMS that was loaded out from the supposed loading gantry of the brand new Port Harcourt Refinery was an ’outdated inventory’ from the outdated Port Harcourt Refinery.
“So, how did the purported ’outdated inventory’ transfer from the outdated Port Harcourt Refinery to the loading gantry of the brand new Port Harcourt Refinery?
“Going by the flawed argument of the so-called ‘group individual’, outdated PMS inventory from the outdated Port Harcourt Refinery may be moved to the loading gantry of the brand new Port-Harcourt Refinery for a present, however newly produced PMS from the outdated Port-Harcourt Refinery can solely be loaded at its personal devoted gantry. That is nothing however ignorance on full show!” Soneye emphasised.
On the present capability of the refinery, Soneye said, “The nameplate capability of the refinery is 60,000 barrels of oil per day. It’s at the moment producing at 90 per cent throughput which interprets to Straight-Run gasoline (Naptha) blended into 1.4 million litres of PMS, except for different merchandise like diesel and kerosene.
“We name on most people to ignore the claims of the self-acclaimed ‘group individual’ that are clearly borne out of sheer mischief and blatant show of ignorance,” the assertion concluded