The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, Financial and Operations Report for May 2017 released on Thursday, July 20, revealed that average national daily gas supply to the nation’s power plants has climbed 64 per cent.
The average Natural Gas supply to power plants of 729 million standard cubic feet of gas per day (mmscfd) in May 2017 was 63.74 per cent higher than the daily gas supply to the plants, of 446mmscfd, during the same month in 2016.
According to the report, the average national daily gas production for May 2017 stood at 242.70billion cubic feet (BCF) or an average of 7,829.11mmscfd, representing a slight increase, compared with April gas production of 672mmscfd.
The report also stated that NNPC, within the period under review, activated plans to build 500million standard cubic feet of gas-per-day metering plant to serve the planned capacity expansion of Egbin Power Plant.
It said the three refineries in Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna were operational in May 2017, with a minimum of 6m litres of PMS, otherwise called petrol, and a similar quantity of Automotive Gas Oil, also known as diesel, loaded out from the refineries daily.
The three NNPC refineries have a combined nameplate capacity of 445,000 barrels of crude oil per stream day.
The report indicated that the rehabilitation of the refineries would restore their nameplate capacities.
Diesel price, the report also noted, witnessed a nationwide crash by as much as 42 per cent following strategic intervention by the Corporation to sustain supply of diesel and avoid the first quarter, 2017 unpleasant experience when retail price of AGO shot to an all-time high of N300 per litre. The intervention pushed the product’s retail prices as at May 2017 to rally between N175 and N200 across the country.
It further said that the number of pipeline breaks recorded within the period stood at 55, which was an improvement compared to 82 vandalized points recorded in April 2017. This figure represents about 33 per cent reduction relative to the previous months and also a remarkable improvement to corresponding period of May 2016 which recorded 260 cases.
