The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited has set a new deadline of June 2026 to select technical partners for the rehabilitation and operation of Nigeria’s three state-owned refineries, after repeated delays and a severe erosion of in-house refining expertise.
Speaking at a press briefing in Abuja on Monday, where NNPCL announced a record Profit After Tax of ₦5.4 trillion for the 2024 financial year, its highest ever, Group Chief Executive Officer Bayo Ojulari disclosed the updated timeline during the question-and-answer session.
Ojulari acknowledged that the Port Harcourt, Warri, and Kaduna refineries, even after ongoing rehabilitation work, continue to operate “well below international standards,” rendering their products commercially unviable, particularly when compared with output from the privately owned Dangote Refinery.
To reverse decades of decline, he said the company will now partner only with established private operators that currently own and successfully run refineries elsewhere.
He said the partnerships will be strictly commercial, driven by proven track records rather than political or state-directed considerations.
“Everything will be in place. So I will have a clear roadmap towards the completion of those refineries. Let me give you two more things that most people may not be aware of. If we go by the original plan, let’s just assume we go ahead, right? By the time we finish the ongoing rehabilitation, the products from those refineries will be far lower standard than the Dangote refinery, and will be two steps lower standard than the current international specifications.
“So when you use the word hybrid, right, is that we want to redesign to a hybrid, so that the product that we produce will be of international standard, so that we can commercially market it, right? That requires some redesign. So we don’t want to preempt by just giving you a date just for it, but we know that we should be able to do that more credibly sometime in Q2 next year.”
Ojulari added that NNPCL will only announce firm completion dates once the detailed redesigns and hybridisation upgrades required to bring the refineries up to global standards have been finalised and approved.
The June 2026 target for selecting partners is the latest chapter in a decades-long struggle to revive Nigeria’s three state-owned refineries — Port Harcourt (210,000 bpd), Warri (125,000 bpd), and Kaduna (110,000 bpd) — which together have a nameplate capacity of 445,000 barrels per day but have operated at near-zero levels for most of the past 15 years.
Since the early 2000s, successive governments have spent an estimated ₦18 trillion (including forex components) on repeated cycles of Turnaround Maintenance and rehabilitation contracts, yet none of the plants has achieved sustained production.
Port Harcourt Refinery is currently undergoing a $1.5 billion rehabilitation led by Tecnimont;
Warri Refinery is being revamped through a joint programme with South Korea’s Daewoo Engineering & Construction;
Kaduna Refinery, the most deteriorated of the three, requires a comprehensive overhaul and reconfiguration to process a wider range of crude grades efficiently.
The stark contrast with the 650,000 bpd Dangote Refinery, which is already producing Euro-V specification petrol, diesel, and jet fuel — has underscored how far the state-owned facilities have fallen behind in both technology and operational efficiency, making the search for credible, experienced private operators even more urgent.
