The Secretary of the Alesa Community Stakeholders, Timothy Mgbere, has alleged that the petroleum products recently loaded from the newly rehabilitated Port Harcourt Refinery were not freshly refined but instead stored products left in the facility’s storage tanks for the past three years.
Speaking as a guest on Arise TV on Thursday, Mgbere also criticized the refinery’s performance, claiming that only six trucks were loaded on Tuesday despite the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) stating that 200 trucks would be dispatched daily.
Alesa, one of the 10 major communities in Eleme, Rivers State, hosts the Port Harcourt Refinery. The community has expressed reservations about the facility’s operational claims following its relaunch.
On Tuesday, the refinery resumed operations after years of inactivity, with NNPCL announcing that the 60,000-barrel-per-day facility had been upgraded with modern equipment and was operating at 70% of its installed refining capacity.
NNPCL had stated that the rehabilitated refinery would produce daily outputs of 1.5 million litres of diesel, 2.1 million litres of low-pour fuel oil, 900,000 litres of kerosene, and 1.4 million litres of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), among others.
It also announced plans to release 200 trucks of petrol into the Nigerian market daily.
But speaking during the interview, the secretary described the ceremony held as a “party”, stressing that the full units of the old complex are not functional.
He said, “The Port Harcourt refinery, and by extension, the Port Harcourt depot, happens to be the mainstay of the Alesa community economy, the economic activities emanating from the operations of these depots means a lot to us as a community people, but as it were, now, I don’t think it’s a cause for celebration yet, because what we are having in the media space is different from what we have on the ground.
“I can tell you on authority as a community person, that what happened on Tuesday was just a mere show at the Port Harcourt depot,
“A mere show in the sense that the Port Harcourt refinery, we call it area five, that is the old refinery, is merely in skeletal operation.
“When I say skeletal, I mean that some units of the refinery were recently brought up and are running, but not the entire unit of the old refinery is functional, as we speak.
“I will give them the credit that at least they have started something, but not to say, according to the Head of Corporate Communication of the NNPC limited, Femi Soneye, like it is in the media that they are already producing 1.4m barrels per day. That’s not the case. That’s not true.
“It’s a very big, I don’t want to use the word lie, but as an agency that is holding the oil industry on trust for Nigerians, they shouldn’t put out some of this information that is not true.”
He added, “The true picture of what happened on Tuesday is that the NNPC has been under pressure to televise to Nigerians that everything is okay and then that the old refinery has started functioning.
“I can tell you that the GMD, or the CEO of the refinery, was in Port Harcourt since Monday; the other MDs were also in Port Harcourt. The MD of Port Harcourt refinery and those heading the operations department didn’t sleep through the night of Monday to Tuesday because of this whole event they had on Tuesday.
“What is the true picture? The Old Port Harcourt refinery is built with its utilities, different from the new complex. The tank farm that is servicing the Old Port Harcourt refinery has a different loading gantry at the depot.”
He added that NNPCL only dispatched six trucks on Tuesday, relying solely on the existing stock at the Port Harcourt Refinery.
He further stressed that the refinery was not producing 1.4m barrels of litres of petrol per day and urged the NNPCL to stop putting out false information to deceive Nigerians.
Continuing, he said, “The party they had on Tuesday was held at the new loading gantry that is directly connected to the new refinery. And so, how does that work? It is impossible.
“They went there because the storage facility for the old refinery had some stock, old stock that has been there for over three years.
“And so what they had, they released that stock, and then loaded six trucks and then televised it to Nigerians that it is the production from the old refinery. That’s not true.
“And so I like Nigerians to know the truth, but they don’t need to believe me, because Nigerians, no matter how you paint the true pictures to them, they get sentimental. They get tribal. They want to whip some sentiment and all that the product that was loaded. But let it be on record that it was only six trucks that they used to calibrate the new loading gantry. The product was not a new refined product from the old refinery.”
