Hopes of regularly supply of refined petrol in-country has brightened as the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), announced on Tuesday that the Port Harcourt refinery had commenced operations.
The Port Harcourt refinery has the capacity to refine about 210,000 barrels of crude oil per day translating to five million litres of petrol.
Though, the Group General Manager, Group Public Affairs, NNPC, Mr. Garba Deen Muhammed, admitted that the refinery was not yet producing at full capacity, he added that the current production level remained at three to five million litres daily.
The resumption of the refinery to production would help cushion part of the biting effect of petrol scarcity, especially in the South Eastern and South-South region of the country.
The NNPC had on Wednesday, January 17, 2016 shut the Port Harcourt and Kaduna refineries due to what it termed sabotage to crude pipelines. The plants, according to the Corporation were shut because of “breaches” to the Bonny- Okrika supply line to Port Harcourt and the Escravos- Warri pipeline to Kaduna.
Meanwhile, fuel scarcity continued to bite harder in Edo State Tuesday, as many filling stations in Benin were out of stock.
At the NNPC mega filling station along Sapele Road, long queue of vehicles were noticed awaiting the arrival of fuel to the station.
A few stations that had petrol sold the product at between N195.00 and N200 per litre.
In Lagos, the queues were yet to completely disappear according to The Newswriter investigations. Majority of the filling stations still had queues, though better than the situation was last week.
Mobil filling stations on Agidingbi and Oregun had queues of motorists as at 3.00pm yesterday ditto for the Oando on Iju road.
On the Lagos Badagry Expressway, Forte filling station at Ibiye bus stop and Total at Cele Ijanikin,since the return of fuel scarcity have subjected motorists to untold hardship by restricting sale of petrol on one pump while all others pump will remain idle.
According to a resident within the neighbourhood, Mr. Seyi Akeju, the situation most of the time leads to long queues, thereby compounding traffic on the dilapidated road.
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