Lukman said that poor maintenance culture of the refineries had been the curse of the refineries, pointing out that the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has come out with closing date for completing the turn-around maintenance of the country’s refineries.
According to Lukman, Our ultimate ambition is to stop exporting crude oil, add value to our crude so that we can export refined products. This is what is done in other countries.
He told the committee that although the refineries in the country were old, but they were not beyond repairs as, according to him, older refineries in other parts of the world are performing at optimum capacity due to good maintenance.
Lukman expressed concern that private investors who got grant to set up refineries have not done so, pointing out that the level of profit on spending and partial deregulations were discouraging them.
According to Lukman, We have given licenses to people to build refineries but they are useless licenses as long as subsidies stays nobody is going to bring in money from outside.
Our refineries have not performed well; they have not performed well and they cannot be allowed to continue to perform the way they are doing.
They can perform better and more importantly we will encourage people to set up more refineries; two or three more refineries are now being considered partly by private and partly by joint ventures with NNPC.”
Our thought is that when the current refineries are put into an acceptable level of performance, they will be partially privatized so that they can perform largely better more than when they are fully owned by government.
