The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu on Thursday, stated that the completion of Dangote Refinery would turn the country’s refineries to scraps.
Kachikwu, who spoke at a two-day stakeholder consultation meeting on draft National Gas Policy and National Oil Policy in Abuja, was of the opinion that the refineries should be properly fixed before the completion of Dangote Refinery in 2019.
“Refineries will have to work. If time goes by and Dangote Refinery begins in 2019, we will have scraps,” he said.
The government refineries in Port Harcourt, Kaduna and Warri, are not producing maximally.
Kachikwu, who gave a keynote address at the event on “Strengthening regulation in the oil and gas sector,” also talked about the need for full deregulation of the sector.
He said: “A lot of things happening in the industry for so long have been taken as a norm. If the only thing we succeed in doing is dealing with deregulation, subsidy removal, joint cash venture before December, then we are succeeding.
“We still refine crude oil for $28 per barrel. We have to bring it below $18 per barrel.”
Speaking on the sector’s deregulation, he said: “What is important is where are we heading to? Where we are heading is to try and free the industry so that it can do its own rule, set its own prices.
“There are few mechanics that we still have to get in place properly. We can’t forget the fact that we still have foreign exchange challenges; we can’t forget the fact that income to government is still very tight, so you need to see how you balance that.
“But what is important is the objective. The objective is still to fully deregulate and we have started that process. It is a continuing process and we will continue to finetune it until we get to where we should be.”
Stakeholders at the forum, however, called for full deregulation of the sector.
It would be recalled that the Chief Operating Officer of the company, Mr Olakunle Alake, had said Dangote Industries Limited 17 billion-dollar refinery project will create over 300,000 direct and indirect jobs by the first quarter of 2019.
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