The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation has committed to supply crude oil to a refinery project on Tomaro Island in Lagos, with a capacity of 20,000 barrels per day.
Integrated Oil & Gas Limited, the promoters of the Eko Petrochem and Refining Company, disclosed this on Saturday, saying it had spent over $20m on the project.
The Chairman/Chief Executive Officer, Integrated Oil & Gas Limited, Emmanuel Iheanacho, who noted that the company got a grant of $797,343 in 2017 from the United States Trade and Development Agency for the project, said it would cost $200m to build it.
“We have worked very hard; it has been much harder than we thought it could be in terms of the time that it has taken and the resources that we have had to commit to it,” Iheanacho said on Saturday during the visit by a delegation from the Ministry of Petroleum Resources to the project site.
The delegation, led by the Director, Upstream at the ministry, Mr Busari Kamoru, visited the company to ascertain the progress made so far on the project and the challenges facing it.
Iheanacho said when the company started the project, it articulated bankable feasibility proposal, and then we went ahead to do the front-end engineering, adding that the detailed engineering was done recently.
He said, “In terms of licensing, we started with the Licence to Establish, and then we have now got the Authority to Construct. Now, we are at a point where we are talking to potential investors, and we have sent out invitation-to-tender documents to a number of world-class engineering, procurement and construction companies.
“We are hoping that sometime in the middle of June, we will get their responses. At that point, we will then sit down and look at who will give us the best mix of price, quality and proposition.
Iheanacho said the company applied to the NNPC for crude oil supply when it started the project.
“They looked at the proposition we put before them, and they gave us a guarantee to supply a certain proportion of the feedstock that we require. But that does not stop us from also making arrangements with other third-party traders in oil, and we are also actively talking to those people,” he added.
Meanwhile, the NNPC condensate refinery programme targeting the continuous supply of feedstock to mini refineries is expected to gain traction in the coming months.
This was revealed at the recently concluded Nigerian Oil and Gas Opportunity Fair, according to a statement by the event consulting firm, Jake Riley.
It said as modular refineries were springing up in different parts of the country, the programme broke the jinx that held 40 out of the 44 active licensees back as of 2018 from translating their licenses into actual projects.
The Managing Director of Jake Riley, Funmi Ogbue, said, “We need the Petroleum Industry Bill now more than ever before. The prolonged period of uncertainty is dampening the enthusiasm of prospective investors with interests in Nigeria.”
