Nigeria said Saturday it was considering plans to use light vessels to supply crude oil to its dormant refineries after years of attacks on pipelines by armed militants in southern Niger Delta.
“We are considering the use of smaller vessels as alternative to supply crude to the refineries,” Reginald Stanley, the head of the state-run agency managing the nation’s crude oil and petrol pipelines said in a radio programme.
Stanley, managing director of the Pipelines and Products Marketing Company (PPMC) said the nation’s two key refineries in Warri (south) and Kaduna (north) had remained “idle” since the trunk supplying them crude was attacked by militants in May last year.
The two refineries accounted for about half of the nation’s total refining capacity of 445,000 barrels per day.
He said that PPMC engineers have in the past two years repaired more than 500 leaks — mostly caused by militants — on two southern oil trunklines.
“The refineries are ready to run but they have no crude supplies and that is why they remain idle,” said Stanley.
“If the pipelines were not tampered with, then the refineries will be working. It is a matter of pipeline vandalisation,” a spokesman of the state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Levi Ajuonuma, also said on the same radio phone-in programme.
“The vandals are our common enemies,” he said, and urged the local communities across the country to protect the pipelines which he described as “national assets.”
Nigeria, the world’s eight oil exporter, has been importing most of its refined petroleum products for more than a decade to meet local demand due to the under-performance of its four refineries.
Attacks by Niger Delta militants, especially since 2006, have added largely to the woes of the country, forcing it to import about 70 percent of its needed refined petrol.
The country has also in the past two months been facing constant fuel scarcity, mainly due to non-payment of arrears of subsidies to importers.