The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) has set a new deadline of June 2026 to conclude the selection of technical partners for the country’s state-owned refineries, marking a renewed push to restore facilities that have suffered decades of mismanagement and technical decline.
The Group Chief Executive Officer of NNPCL, Bayo Ojulari, revealed the new target during a question-and-answer session at a media briefing in Abuja on Monday, where the company also announced a record Profit After Tax of N5.4tn for the 2024 financial year — the highest in its history.
Ojulari admitted that the Port Harcourt, Warri, and Kaduna refineries remain far below global performance standards despite ongoing rehabilitation, making them commercially uncompetitive when compared with privately run facilities such as the Dangote Refinery. He attributed this to a long-term erosion of Nigeria’s technical capacity to operate world-class refineries.
According to him, NNPCL is now pursuing a new reform strategy that centres on partnering exclusively with private entities that already operate successful refineries. These partnerships, he explained, must be anchored on verifiable experience, strong technical credentials, and purely commercial terms not government-driven arrangements.
He noted that the heavy reliance on foreign expertise in the Dangote Refinery is evidence of how far Nigeria’s refinery-management capability has declined. Years of underinvestment, weak governance structures, and deteriorating technical know how, he said, have made it impossible for the country to run its refineries at competitive international standards.
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Ojulari added that NNPCL is evaluating the option of redesigning its refineries into hybrid plants to meet global product specifications. He stressed that definitive completion timelines would only be set after these redesign and hybridisation plans are finalised, promising clearer details by mid-2026.
He further cautioned that if the original rehabilitation plan is followed without adjustments, the refineries would still produce fuel “significantly below” current global specifications falling even further behind the quality of products from the Dangote Refinery.
Ojulari assured that by mid-2026, NNPCL expects to have fully defined its technical partnerships, signed new commercial contracts, and established a clear roadmap for completing the refinery overhaul.
