Weekend’s attack on the Nigeria Gas Company’s pipeline connected to Chevron Nigeria Limited’s facility at Escravos, has led to a loss of 160mmsfcd of gas daily. At a cost of $2.50 per thousand scf, this loss means about $400,000 loss to the country on a daily basis (N78,800,000 daily) in gas volume. This is in addition to losses to be incurred daily from affected Power generation ($1,988,223 or N391,680,000 daily). The total daily loss to the country is therefore estimated at N470,479,931, Power Minister, Raji Fashola has said.
This is as the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has announced the “operational shutdown” of the Port Harcourt and Kaduna refineries, owing to crude supply challenges arising from recent attacks on vital crude oil pipelines. According to Ohi Alegbe, group general manager of the corporation, who released a statement to announce the move, the plants were shut simultaneously on Sunday after the Bonny-Okrika crude supply line to the Port Harcourt Refinery and the Escravos-Warri crude supply line to the Kaduna Refinery suffered breaches.
Fashola in a statement, said the real sector of the economy has also been counting its losses as some cement companies around Olorunsogo like Ewekoro and Ibese are also affected.
“The latest incident has occurred just as the Federal Government through the Ministry of Power, Works and Housing and the Ministry of Petroleum Resources along with allied agencies has been making concerted efforts to improve gas supplies to the Power Plants. Such efforts led to previously offline plants like Ihovbor and Sapele coming back online and the subsequent output making up for the loss in power. The pipelines are being actively monitored for further attacks or other unforeseen impacts.
“Available records show that six incidences of vandalism from December 2014 to February 2015 which affected the Trans Forcados Pipeline (at Oben, Sapele, Oredo ) and Escravos Lagos Pipeline System (CNL) led to a loss of 1,100 MMScfd. According to industry experts, a loss of 200 MMscd is equivalent to a Power reduction of 700MW.
“While the industry is currently generating about 4120Mwh/h on average (as at 17/01/2016), it is without doubt that performance would have been better without the additional setback caused by the weekend’s incident.
“It would be recalled that during the monthly meeting of the Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Mr Babatunde Fashola SAN with operators in the Power Sector last week the Nigeria Gas Company (NGC), the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and the GACN led by the Minister of State of Petroleum, Dr Ibe Kachikwu shared information on significant gas projects that will improve gas supply which are scheduled for completion in Q2 of 2016 and also highlighted some of the challenges especially related to security affecting delivery of gas to the power sector.”
Before the closure, the Port Harcourt Refinery was recording a daily PMS yield of over 4.1 million litres while Kaduna Refinery was posting a daily petrol production of about 1.3 million litres. “The Warri Refining and Petrochemicals Company, WRPC is still on stream and producing a little above 1.4 million Litres of petrol per day,” the statement said. However, NNPC assured that it had “put in place strategies to guarantee unimpeded country-wide availability of petroleum products.
“In response to the unexpected setback, we have activated comprehensive remedial measures to sustain the prevailing stability in the supply and distribution of petroleum products across the country,” NNPC said.