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The Federal Government has said it may sell off its publicly-owned refineries to attract investors, boost competition, and improve efficiency in the downstream oil sector.

The Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Energy, Olu Verheijen, stated this in an interview with Bloomberg TV anchor, Joumanna Bercetche, on the sidelines of the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference (ADIPEC).

She stated that selling off the refineries owned by the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC Ltd) was one of several reform options the government is exploring to reposition the energy sector for sustainable growth. Verheijen said: “It’s one of the options that you have to consider if you find the right technical partner with the right capital.”

The plants have largely been sustained by subsidies, but now that we’ve removed the subsidies, we’ve removed the distortions in that market,” she added. She stated that the government’s reform agenda under President Tinubu aims to restore market efficiency and transparency, ensuring that the petroleum sector operates on purely commercial terms.

The nation’s four refineries now owned by the NNPC Ltd are: the Port Harcourt Refining Company Limited (PHRC) that comprises two refineries at Alesa-Eleme near Port Harcourt in Rivers State with a jetty (for product import and export).

At inception, it had the capacity to process 150,000 barrels of crude per day but was later upgraded to 210,000 barrels per day. Another one is the Warri Refining and Petro-chemical Company which was built to process 100,000 barrels of crude oil per day but was later de-bottlenecked in 1987 to process 125,000 barrels per day.

The next refinery is the Kaduna refinery that was designed for a capacity of 60,000 BPSD but later the Federal Government decided that the capacity of any re- finery in Nigeria should not be below 100,000 BPSD.

It has been reported that Nigeria spent about $25 billion on turn- around maintenance of refineries in the past 25 years. Regardless of the past rehabilitations, the NNPCL audit report had in 2020 revealed that three of the nation’s four refineries recorded N1.64 trillion cumulative losses in their 2014 to 2018 details.

The current Buhari administration had awarded contracts for the rehabilitation of some of the nation’s refineries. The then Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Sylva, had after the FEC meeting in Abuja said the FEC approved the sum of $1.48 billion for the rehabilitation of the Warri and Kaduna refineries.