Petroleum marketers have lamented that the volume of Premium Motor Spirit, also known as petrol, produced by the Dangote Petroleum Refinery is too insufficient to meet domestic demand.
Consequently, PMS dealers are planning to import the product to bolster its supply from the $20 billion Lekki-based plant.
According to reports, the marketers have aligned with the Trade Union Congress to demand that the refinery ramp up production, as some alleged that the plant was producing about 10 million litres of petrol daily, as against the 25 million litres that it earlier promised to produce.
On September 15, when the refinery commenced the release of PMS to the domestic marketer, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited announced that it (NNPCL) was to load 16.8 million litres of petrol from the Dangote refinery.
This was in contrast to the 25 million litres that the refinery had announced earlier it would release to the NNPCL daily.
On September 3, 2024, the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority disclosed that the refinery would supply 25 million litres of petrol to the Nigerian market daily starting from September.
It added that this would rise to 30 million litres from September. In a short statement, the NMDPRA said it met with NNPC to agree on local crude supply to the refinery.
“At the NMDPRA headquarters in Abuja, NNPC reached an agreement to commence crude oil sale and supply to Dangote refinery in local currency.
“The refinery is now poised to supply an initial 25 million litres of PMS into the domestic market this September. And will subsequently increase this amount to 30 million litres daily from October 2024,” the NMDPRA stated on its X page at the time.
However, oil marketers stated on Tuesday that, the multi-billion dollar refinery was not producing up to that volume, as they aligned with the TUC to call on the plant to ramp up production or this would be sorted through the importation of PMS by dealers.
Speaking during a press briefing recently in Abuja, the National President, Trade Union Congress, Festus Osifo, said NNPCL should source refined petrol from other places if the Dangote refinery could not meet the current daily demands of Nigerians.
“If it (petrol) is not available, it is a problem. If, for example, the production from Dangote Refinery is less than 15 million litres per day, it is not sufficient.
“So, while efforts are being made to ramp up production from Dangote refinery, what we are demanding is that we should look for every other means as we are ramping up production, we should source for that difference and bring it in for a while until Dangote can get to that level where the production is sufficient to get to all nooks and crannies of Nigeria.
“For us, that is key because it will address the issue of availability,” the TUC boss asserted.
