The Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, Mele Kyari, has said that the rehabilitation of Port Harcourt refinery in Rivers State is the most transparent contract and expects the contractor to be excellent with the work.
Kyari who was represented by Umar Ajiya, the Chief Financial Officer said this on Thursday at the kick off meeting on the rehabilitation of Port Harcourt Refinery Company (PHRC).
The meeting signified the take off of the rehabilitation project which will be funded through Internally Generated Revenue (IGR), Afreximbank and budgetary provisions.
“We expect 90 per cent operational values after the rehabilitation of the refineries in production capacity, Kyari said
Kyari said the Federal Government will support the Contractor in ensuring prompt completion of the project.
He urged officials of Tecnimont SPA to ensure that the project is delivered at the scheduled time to help boost the country’s local refining capacity.
“We shall from time to time visit to see the progress of work outside, and sooner than later we shall come on to commission the work,” he said.
“We will support all that is necessary to be done to expedite the rehabilitation; we are ready to support your contract to secure the necessary approvals internally within Nigeria.”
He reiterated that the NNPC would provide support to meet the desire of Nigerians to see the corporation refining petroleum products.
He said the project will be monitored by the Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission (ICRC), Ministry of finance, Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), among others.
In his remarks, the Managing Director of Port Harcourt Refinery Company, Dikko Ahmed said the government has met with the host communities in building a partnership with them.
He said the communities will benefit from the project beyond the provision of jobs for youths.
“We have met with the host communities, we just don’t want them to create employment, we want them to be partners in this project and we can do it in various ways,” he said.
“For employment, they will have priorities in that but there are other things they will require that we will be ready to do for them as we journey into this project.”
The representative of Technimont SPA, Masu Alberto said the journey started in 2017 with integrity test of the refinery.
He said the refinery’s Technical Building would be refurbished while the Fire Fighting and deluge Sprinkler systems will be replaced.
“In 2019, we did work on it and then now we are deploying a good number of engineers. Due to the pandemic, it’s quite challenging deploying people but we have to trudge on,” he said.
It will be recalled that in March, the Federal Executive Council (FEC) approved the sum of $1.5 billion for the rehabilitation exercise.
The repair will be done in three phases of 18, 24 and 44 months.
