Mele Kyari, Group Chief Executive Officer of Nigerian National Petroleum Company, Limited, has stated that the nation cannot legalise artisanal refineries, referring to them as nothing more than cooking pots.
Small-scale crude oil processing or ongoing petroleum distillation that frequently takes place outside the purview of state legislation is referred to as artisanal oil refining.
On Monday, Kyari participated in an interview with Nigerian Television Authority (NTA).
To eliminate soot pollution in the Niger Delta, industry stakeholders had called for accommodations for artisanal refineries.
But Kyari observed that rather than engaging in illegal refining, modular refineries should be promoted. He added: "That's why licences are given out for modular refineries, and they may produce up to 1,000 barrels to 20,000 barrels per day (bpd).
”Refining is a science of its own. The cooking pots you are seeing are not refineries in any sense.
“There’s simply no way you can convert these cooking pots to legal refineries. It’s not possible. But modular refineries can be constructed and the NNPCL has a framework for supporting those who want to do modular refineries.”
The NNPC boss said Nigeria loses 700,000 bpd to crude oil theft and production shut-ins, saying: “It works two ways — one is the direct stealing of the oil and then being processed at the illegal refineries and also taken out from the pipelines.
“What happens is that whenever you have such massive infractions, we shut down our facilities and, therefore, this is opportunity loss. The production that could have come on the table and that is why we are currently on the average of 1.4 million barrels of oil.
“We had the capacity to do 2.1 million. You can technically say that you have lost about 700,000 barrels of oil per day of production. But it doesn’t mean 700,000 bpd are stolen.”
He added that the country would have no option than to shut down the facilities.