Monday, June 1, 2015

Port Harcourt Refinery Repairs End Soon – Enjugu, MD

By ADEWALE SANYAOLU

Nigeria’s biggest refinery, Port Harcourt Refining Company (PHRC) Limited has said its refinery rehabilitation is nearing completion.
Managing Director, Dr. Bafred Audu Enjugu also said upon completion of work, the 210,000 barrels per day refinery would have attained 80 per cent capacity utilization.
According to him, the remaining rehabilitation work will, however, be carried out in phases in a strategy that would permit operations to progress at available units of the complex while repairs continue on other processing units.


When completed, the refinery is expected to stop significant volume of petroleum products currently imported, substantially cut subsidy bill on government and also evolve a sustainable model for use of in-country capacity for maintenance of all local refineries.
The Executive Director, Operations, Mr. V. A. Ugochukwu, said the refinery had concentrated on production of low value products in the past because units that optimize full value production were not available due to long period of lack of required Turn-Around Maintenance (TAM).
He said the operations and maintenance team has robust experience to bring the plants to full operations, add maximum value to crude oil, and pump out premium products to the market.
Also speaking, Executive Director, Services, Sir Ralph Ugwu, stated that the rehabilitation project is receiving full host community support and has seen unprecedented staff enthusiasm in tackling such an intricate and complicated challenge.
According to him, the rehabilitation is to be carried out by indigenous workforce without compromising standards, adding that the project model would give full expression to the targets and objectives of the highly-applauded Nigerian Content policy which, he explained, has been very successful in the upstream sector of the petroleum industry.
With the project, he said, PHRC would lead to the implementation and compliance of Nigerian Content policy in the downstream end of the industry. 
Enjugu told visiting journalists in Port Harcourt that the management, with the support of the parent company – Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), have used the period of crude supply glitch at the refinery to embark on rehabilitation of Area I which hosts the Crude Distillation Unit (CDU) to pave way for simultaneous operations and upgrade of other units ahead of July when crude supply to the plant is expected to be restored. 
Enjugu said Area I of the refining complex is prioritized because of process sequence while the optimization units such as the Catalytic Reformation Unit (CRU) and the Fluid Catalytic Cracking Unit (FCCU) are to be rehabilitated subsequently. The units, he said, further process initial output of the CDU to produce premium products used for blending primary products of CDU to achieve products of high octane rating. 
The 210, 000 barrels per day refinery is expected to exceed 80 per cent availability by first quarter of 2016 when all the units are expected to have been fully revamped and upgraded.

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