African Refineries Port Harcourt Limited (ARPHL) has announced the award of the Phase 1 contract for the colocation of a Greenfield Refinery to Messrs Maire Technimont SpA, a leading global Oil & Gas Refining, Chemical & Petrochemical, Fertilizers and Power EPC company as the FEPC contractor, ahead of the full implementation of its Refinery Project in Port Harcourt Rivers State.
The refinery would process Nigerian crude oil and create Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), Automotive Gas Oil (AGO), Jet A-1, Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), and Low Pour Fuel Oil at a rate of 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) (LPFO).
This comes after ARPHL and NNPC reached an agreement to buy a 10% ownership stake in ARPHL’s 100,000 BPD refinery at the same location. This was said lately by ARPHL’s Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Omotayo Adebajo.
The Front-End Engineering Design (FEED) Contract is the initial step toward building a plant at the current Port Harcourt Refinery Battery Limit that can process up to 100,000 barrels per day of crude oil and 10,000 barrels per day of sustainable aviation fuel or Biojet. The plant is scheduled to open in 2025.
In 2016, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) advertised a Request for Proposal in all major newspapers, seeking bids for private investors to invest in the collocation of crude oil refineries within its existing refinery sites in Kaduna, Port Harcourt, and Warri, in order to increase Nigeria’s national refining capacity from 445,000BPD to 695,000BPD in the shortest possible time frame, in line with the Federal Government’s strategic plan.
ARPHL was chosen as the collocation partner to run and operate a 100,000 BPD refinery on 45 hectares of vacant land within the battery limit of the Port Harcourt Refinery Complex (“PHRC”) in Alesa-Eleme, Rivers State, following a transparent bid process conducted by NNPC in accordance with the Bureau of Public Enterprise (BPE) guidelines.
As a result of the new business reality brought on by COVID-19, ARPHL and NNPC have revised their original plan to relocate a brownfield crude oil refinery and will now build a 100,000 bpd greenfield refinery adjacent to the existing 150,000 bpd Port Harcourt Refinery Complex. The project is expected to take three years to complete.
The project is part of NNPC’s plan to upgrade its mid-stream and downstream assets in South-South and South-East Nigeria, which includes refurbishing the Port Harcourt Refineries and various crude oil/petroleum pipelines, NNPC tank farms, and oil depots. This is a project that will employ at least 15,000 Nigerians during construction and another 2,000 afterward, in accordance with local content regulations that will benefit the Nigerian people and economy.
Following the completion of the refinery, ARPHL will be exclusively responsible for the refinery’s effective and sustainable administration, operations, and maintenance, as stipulated in the agreement with NNPC. This is a significant step toward NNPC’s goal and commitment to support and increase local refining capacity, which is essential for Nigeria to become a net exporter of petroleum products.
