Abuja, Nigeria | – The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources and the group managing director Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu has disclosed that President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the next restructuring phase of the NNPC.
Kachikwu said at a town hall meeting with journalists and civil society organisations in Abuja that the next phase of the restructuring, as approved by the president, would see the state oil company broken into four different autonomous profit-oriented companies.
According to him, the four firms to emerge from the exercise are the upstream company, the downstream company, midstream company, and the refining group holding company. All of them would operate independently with quasi-managing directors and remit profits and taxes to the coffers of the government.
In another development, Nigeria has restarted its northern Kaduna refinery, an official at NNPC said on Monday after a pipeline pumping crude to the plant resumed operations.
The refinery, which has a capacity of 110,000 barrels a day, resumed on Saturday, said Ohi Alegbe, a spokesman for NNPC. He gave no production data.
Nigeria’s four ageing oil refineries produced nothing in October, despite a goal from the state company to produce 30 percent of its own gasoline in 2016.
Despite exporting 2 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil, Nigeria is almost wholly reliant on imported gasoline, kerosene and other petroleum products.
