45 licences which were issued by the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) between 2002 and 2014 for the establishment of private refineries in the country, have been withdrawn as the projects failed to take off after an 18-month deadline, due to political interferences, a lack of finance and technical know-how and inability to get the assurance of crude oil supply from the Federal Government, The Guardian reports.
A DPR official said that many of the investors were skeptical about starting off due to crude oil supply guarantee and lack of funding. According to the source, the investors later encountered the challenge of securing crude oil and were concerned by the fact that the crude was going to be sold to them at the international market price.
The source, who hinted that investors were looking for incentives from the government to be able to build private refineries, said it was somehow strange because they came forward as investors, who were willing to go into the business, and they requested sovereign guarantee from the Federal Government to enable them access funding from international lending institutions. “What we did was to forward their request to the appropriate quarters. But our main concern was to make sure that the licences were useful. There is a time limit for each licence. When each of them lapsed and nobody came for renewal, the issue died,” he added.
Thus, as a further measure to boost local refining capacity, the DPR has commenced monitoring of 25 modular mini- refineries granted licences last year. The Manager, Communications, DPR, George Ene-Ita, said that the monitoring, which started about a week ago, is geared towards enhancing Federal Government’s repositioning of the petroleum industry and making Nigeria self-sufficient in petroleum products.
