MOSCOW (MRC) -- Nigeria’s cabinet has approved USD1.5 billion of spending on the modernisation of the Port Harcourt oil refinery and awarded a contract to Italy’s Tecnimont, said Hydrocarbonprocessing.
Petroleum Minister Timipre Sylva said.The project will be completed in three phases, the first within 18 months taking the refinery to 90% production capacity, with the second and final phases carried out within 24 months and 44 months respectively, Sylva told reporters in Abuja. Africa’s top oil exporter has made producing its own fuels a priority for years but efforts to revamp its refineries have failed, leaving it almost entirely reliant on imports.
It is now struggling to balance a promise to end costly fuel subsidies with public anger over more expensive fuel. Reuters reported in January that NNPC was in talks to raise around $1 billion to refurbish its largest refining complex at Port Harcourt and that Afreximbank is looking into a facility for the refurbishment.
The country opened bids in December for investors to carry out engineering work for the revamp. Nigeria has four refineries with a combined capacity of 445,000 barrels per day (bpd): one in the north at Kaduna and three in the oil-rich Niger delta region at Warri and Port Harcourt. The Port Harcourt complex consists of two plants with a combined capacity of 210,000 bpd.
In April 2020, they were all shut pending rehabilitation while the refineries lost some 167 billion naira a year early and only Warri processed any oil.
As per MRC, Nigeria is losing 200,000 barrels of crude oil a day because of theft and vandalism, the head of the state oil company said, underscoring how insecurity is causing vast financial losses for the West African country. With Brent Crude oil prices hovering around USD66.70, the losses would amount to more than USD13 million a day and more than USD4.8 billion a year, at a time when Nigeria needs funds to tackle poverty, improve security and boost the economy, which shrank 1.92% in 2020 in part due to the pandemic.
We also remind that in December 2020, Sibur, Gazprom Neft, and Uzbekneftegaz agreed to cooperate on potential investments in Uzbekistan including a major expansion of Uzbekneftegaz’s existing Shurtan Gas Chemical Complex (SGCC) and the proposed construction of a new gas chemicals facility. The signed cooperation agreement for the projects includes “the creation of a gas chemical complex using methanol-to-olefins (MTO) technology, and the expansion of the production capacity of the Shurtan Gas Chemical Complex”.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 2,220,640 tonnes in 2020, up by 2% year on year. Only shipments of low density polyethylene (LDPE) and high density polyethylene (HDPE) increased. At the same time, polypropylene (PP) shipments to the Russian market reached 1 240,000 tonnes in 2020 (calculated using the formula: production, minus exports, plus imports, excluding producers' inventories as of 1 January, 2020). Supply of exclusively PP random copolymer increased.
MRC