“FG To End Petrol Imports In 18 Months” – Kachikwu

The minister of state for petroleum resources, Ibe Kachikwu, has revealed that the federal government is making moves to end the importation of petrol within the next 18 months.

Kachikwu, who disclosed this in Abuja at a press briefing on Tuesday, March 9, while unveiling a strategic policy direction for the oil and gas sector, explained that government was targeting 12 to 18 months period to end petrol imports, working in collaboration with Joint Venture (JV) partners.

He said when this is achieved, the country will begin to look at exporting refined products and expanding retail business.

“We must target a time frame of between 12 and 18 months to try and get out of importation: it is not good for the country; it is not a good image; it does not create jobs; it causes losses of tax income to the government and creates a huge amount of emotional backlash when people have to queue for days looking for fuel.”

“We are working with JV partners who can come into the refinery area; we have advertised recently for co-located refineries, asking for people to come and co-locate brand new refineries, coupled into our refinery premises and they can share pipelines and tankages.”

“We are working hard to see if we can complete the refineries we are trying to do with JV partners within the next 12 to 18 months. For the co-located refineries which are the new ones, we are targeting to see that we are able to complete those over a period of two to three years. If we do that, we will have excess capacity of refined products and we’ll begin to look at export market.”

The minister, who also gave details of the NNPC unbundling, stated that the corporation had been unbundled into seven major divisions and 20 subset firms.