Retailers Back Tinubu on Refineries’ Revival, Demand Define Timelines From NNPC

The Petroleum Products Retail Outlets Owners Association of Nigeria (PETROAN) has commended President Bola Tinubu for distinguishing between refineries that merely run and those that turn a profit, while pressing NNPC Ltd to convert a recent technical partnership agreement from a non-binding memorandum into an enforceable contract with penalties for non-performance.

In a press statement issued Friday and signed by its special adviser on Media, Chris Odia, and national public relations officer, Dr Joseph Obele, the association cited assurances Tinubu gave the newly elected leadership of the Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) at the State House on Thursday, when the President said the appearance of activity at a refinery does not by itself indicate commercial performance.

PETROAN’s national president, Dr Billy Gillis-Harry, described the President’s remark as the most consequential statement on Nigerian refining in a decade, framing it as a shift in how success at the plants should be measured — by margin, throughput and return on capital rather than visible operation.

The association laid out the financial history behind its call for a reset. Roughly $4.15 billion was spent on the Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna refineries between 1993 and 2019, it said, followed by a further $3.14 billion approved by the Federal Executive Council in March 2021 — split among the three plants. Parliamentary and union sources, PETROAN said, put additional operating and rehabilitation costs between 2020 and 2025 at around ₦11.35 trillion.

Port Harcourt briefly resumed operations in late 2024 before shutting again on 24 May 2025 for what was meant to be a month-long maintenance exercise; it has not restarted. NNPC Ltd’s own internal review in February 2026 reportedly found the plants were running at a loss.

PETROAN said it supports the National Assembly’s inquiry into how the funds were spent, arguing that the constraint on Nigerian refining was never primarily financial but a failure of governance, technical ownership and accountability.

Import bill falls, but PETROAN cautions against complacency

The statement acknowledged data showing Nigeria’s petrol import bill fell about 96 per cent, from N2.271 trillion in the first quarter of 2025 to N87.4 billion in the first quarter of 2026, with domestic refineries supplying 76.7 per cent of national petrol volumes in that period, up from 45.2 per cent a year earlier.

But PETROAN warned against reading this as the refining problem solved, arguing that Nigeria has merely swapped import dependence for single-source dependence — a concentration risk it said is structural regardless of whether it sits in Rotterdam or Lekki. Restoring Port Harcourt’s 210,000 barrels-per-day and Warri’s 125,000 bpd capacity, it said, would restore 335,000 bpd of geographically distributed supply and negotiating leverage in the downstream market.

Conditions on the China deal

On the Technical Equity Partnership NNPC Ltd signed in Jiaxing City on 30 April 2026 with Sanjiang Chemical Company Limited and Xingcheng (Fuzhou) Industrial Park Operation and Management Co. Ltd, PETROAN said it backs the equity-based model in principle but noted that NNPC has confirmed the memorandum is non-binding and still subject to regulatory approval and negotiation.

The association listed six conditions it wants met before the deal is publicly celebrated as a success: conversion to a binding agreement with completion dates and enforceable penalties for non-performance; disclosure of the commercial structure, including equity split and crude pricing; public technical due diligence on the plants’ residual value; guaranteed crude feedstock under the Petroleum Industry Act’s Domestic Crude Supply Obligation; genuine transfer of technical skills to Nigerian engineers rather than headcount quotas; and secure product evacuation to prevent leakage into the parallel market.

PETROAN also commended NUPENG’s National Executive President, Comrade Salimon Akanni Oladiti, for pushing refinery revival before the President, and endorsed the union’s call to end casualisation of workers in the upstream sector.

The association said it wants the Port Harcourt and Warri refineries sustainably operational before the next general election, while stressing it is not asking that safety or commissioning standards be compressed to meet a political timeline.