The Petroleum Products Retail Outlets Owners Association of Nigeria (PETROAN) has commended recent remarks made by
President Bola Tinubu, reaffirming his administration’s resolve to revive Nigeria’s ageing refineries during a meeting with members of the executive of the Nigerian union of petroleum and natural gas workers, NUPENG last week in Abuja, Nigeria’s federal capital.
In a press statement issued on monday and signed by Chris Odia, special advisor media, the association also applauded the president for his acceptance of all the assets and liabilities of previous governments without recourse to blame.”Institutional
continuity of obligation is the foundation of investor confidence. Technical partners do not price
political sentiment. They price contractual certainty and the willingness of a sovereign to own
inherited commitments” The statement declared.
On the sums deployed so far for interventions to get the nation’s refineries back on their feets, Dr Billy Gillis-Harry who is the national president of PETROAN noted that
Between 1993 and 2019, roughly 4.15 billion dollars have been deployed across successive
administrations for interventions in the Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna refineries without much sucess to get them back on track
“The Port Harcourt facility briefly resumed operations in late 2024, was shut on 24 May 2025 for maintenance initially scheduled for thirty days, and has not returned. In February 2026, NNPC
Ltd’s own internal assessment concluded that the plants were operating at material losses” he further noted.
On the recent opening of inquiry by the national assembly into how those sums were deployed for intervention purposes, the national president of PETROAN said his association supports the latest development, but noted that the said support is not as a search for scapegoats, but because “A rehabilitation
programme that cannot explain its own cost history cannot credibly forecast its future
performance”
While speaking on the narrative that domestic refining has been solved by private capital, the PETROAN president noted that though data may appear to support this position on first reading, a deeper insight into the conversation he noted suggests otherwise.
“Nigeria’s petrol import bill fell from 2.271 trillion naira in the first quarter of 2025
to 87.4 billion naira in the first quarter of 2026, a decline of about 96 per cent. Domestic
refineries supplied roughly 76.7 per cent of national petrol volumes in that quarter, up from 45.2
per cent a year earlier. For the first time in a generation, most of the fuel Nigerians buy is refined
in Nigeria.
PETROAN reads this differently, and asks the country to read it differently too.
A market that has moved from import dependence to single-source dependence has changed
the shape of its risk, not the size of it. Concentration of supply is a structural vulnerability
whether the concentration sits in Rotterdam or in Lekki. Refineries undergo scheduled
turnarounds. Plants suffer unplanned outages. Marine logistics fail. A retail network that serves
tens of millions of daily transactions requires plurality of supply as a matter of engineering
prudence, not commercial preference”
Restoring 210,000 barrels per day at Port Harcourt and 125,000 barrels per day at Warri according to Gillis-Harry would return 335,000 barrels per day of geographically distributed, competitively independent refining
capacity to the national system. Their value he declared would now be measured in resilience, price discipline,
regional balance, thereby negotiating leverage for the downstream trade. This according to him is a stronger case
than the old import-substitution argument, a position he said policymakers should adopt.
The association noted that bringing the Port Harcourt and Warri refineries into sustainable operation
before the next general election would rank among the current administration’s most consequential
economic achievements while also declaring support for the memorandum of understanding executed months back in jiaxing city on 30 April between NNPC Ltd and Sanjiang chemical company limited and xingcheng(fuzhou) industrial park operation and management co Ltd as part of ongoing process to reposition Nigeria’s oil and gas sector for greater growth.
