Members of the Alesa Community Rivers State where the Port Harcourt Refinery is located said contrary to reports that the facility refined products which were loaded by trucks, one single barrel of crude did not go through the refining chambers.
According to the Alesa Community stakeholders’ secretary-general Timothy Mgbere, what was loaded by trucks were products that have been in storage tank facility for three years. He said only six trucks were loaded petrol and not 200 trucks as being reported in the media.
“I can tell you on authority as a community person, that what happened on Tuesday was just a mere show at the Port Harcourt depot, Mr. Mgbere told the Punch.
“A mere show in the sense that the Port Harcourt refinery, we call it area five, that is the old refinery, is merely in skeletal operation.
“When I say skeletal, I mean that some units of the refinery were recently brought up and are running, but not the entire unit of the old refinery is functional, as we speak.
“I will give them the credit that at least they have started something, but not to say, according to the Head of Corporate Communication of the NNPC limited, Femi Soneye, like it is in the media that they are already producing 1.4m barrels per day. That’s not the case. That’s not true.
“It’s a very big, I don’t want to use the word lie, but as an agency that is holding the oil industry on trust for Nigerians, they shouldn’t put out some of this information that is not true.
“What is the true picture? The Old Port Harcourt refinery is built with its utilities, different from the new complex. The tank farm that is servicing the Old Port Harcourt refinery has a different loading gantry at the depot.’
” The Port Harcourt refinery, and by extension, the Port Harcourt depot, happens to be the mainstay of the Alesa community economy, the economic activities emanating from the operations of these depots means a lot to us as a community people, but as it were, now, I don’t think it’s a cause for celebration yet, because what we are having in the media space is different from what we have on the ground.
The Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation Limited earned high praises for bringing back on stream the 60,000 barrel per day Port Harcourt Refinery. However, this is a new twist to the story. Mgbere said what happened on Tuesday was merely a grand deception of Nigerians by the NNPCL as the facility was not producing 1.4m barrels of litres of petrol per day.
“The party they had on Tuesday was held at the new loading gantry that is directly connected to the new refinery. And so, how does that work? It is impossible.
“They went there because the storage facility for the old refinery had some stock, old stock that has been there for over three years.
“And so, what they had, they released that stock and then loaded six trucks and then televised it to Nigerians that it is the production from the old refinery. That’s not true.”
