Nigeria’s state oil company Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation has established bids for contractors and investors perform rehabilitating and engineering job in a revamp of the nation Port Harcourt refinery.

The Port Harcourt Refinery is made up of two refineries located at Alesa-Eleme, Rivers State. The old refinery has a refining name plate capacity of 60,000 barrels per day and was commissioned in 1965, while the new plant with name plate capacity of 150,000 barrels per day.

 “The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has opened a new chapter in its refineries rehabilitation project with the public opening of bids on Monday for the Engineering, Procurement, and Construction phase of the rehabilitation of the Port Harcourt Refining Company (PHRC),” NNPC has stated. 

 The refineries have been since running on skeletal basis owing to series of unresolved technical hitches which are traceable to dilapidated nature of the plant. Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation has earlier this year shut down the plant for a projected major maintenance.

This coming few months the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation called on interested contractors to bid rehabilitation and repairs of all ageing pipelines and storage depots connecting the nation’s four oil refineries which include Kaduna and Warri refineries.

The Nigeria nation has been faced with serious financial burden owing to huge amount of fund allocated to importation of petroleum products. Just only in 2018, Nigeria has spent about N722.3billion on fuel subsidy, according to the Nigeria Extractive Industry and Transparency Initiative.

The recent partial deregulation of the country’s downstream sector has quickened the emergence of private sector participation in the establishment of private refinery. At the front burner is the recently virtual commissioned Waltersmith 5,000bpd refinery with its future expansion of 45,000bpd by the Nigeria President Muhammadu Buhari.

One of the Africa’s biggest refineries currently under construction is being owned by an Africa richest man Alhaji Aliko Dagote is expected to come on stream soon. The 650,000bpd crude oil Dangote refinery in Lekki Nigeria is finally scheduled to come on stream in 2021.