The Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited has signed a $741 million maintenance service contract with a South Korean engineering firm, Daewoo Engineering and Construction Company Limited, for a quick fix repair of Kaduna Refinery and Petroleum Company (KRPC).
The signing ceremony took place on Thursday at the NNPC Towers in Abuja, according to a statement released by the NNPC.
The federal government announced a few weeks earlier that the commencement of operations at the 60,000-barrel-per-day Port Harcourt refinery had been postponed from December 2022 to the first quarter of 2023.
The current arrangement is a part of measures being made by the federal government to reduce Nigeria’s heavy reliance on petroleum imports, which is a huge source of embarrassment for a country that is the top producer of crude oil in Africa.
The NNPC specified that Daewoo had to increase output at the idle 110,000 barrels per day facility to at least 60% of its capacity by the end of 2024 in accordance with the terms of the deal.
The NNPC now imports all of Nigeria’s gasoline needs due to the strain on the country’s foreign exchange, mostly through crude for fuel swaps with domestic and international traders.
The Kaduna Refinery and Petrochemical complex was commissioned in 1980, and the NNPC expects to fund Daewoo’s “quick-fix” turnaround work there using a combination of its own earnings and outside financing.
Aside from that, the federal government stated that, as part of its intentions to guarantee energy security, it had bought interests in 4 private refineries operating in various parts of the nation. The list of refineries includes the 650,000-barrel-per-day integrated Dangote Refinery in Lagos, the 2,500-barrel-per-day Duport Modular Refinery in Edo, and the 5,000-barrel-per-day Waltersmith Modular Refinery in Imo.
Source: Business Insider Africa
