NNPC to Redesign State Refineries to Rival Dangote, Seeks Private Operators

The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) has announced a new target of June 2026 to finalise the selection of technical partners to manage the country’s moribund state-owned refineries.

The Group Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Bayo Ojulari, disclosed this timeline on Monday in Abuja, framing it as a critical step in a new, commercially-driven strategy to revive the facilities after years of failed rehabilitation attempts.

The announcement came as the company reported a record Profit After Tax of N5.4 trillion for the 2024 financial year, its strongest performance in corporate history.

Ojulari stated that the current management is seeking to partner exclusively with private entities that own and operate functioning refineries, emphasizing that the collaboration would be based on verifiable track records.

“Our intention is to partner with them as a business. Remember, we are not partnering as a government. We are partnering as a CAMA company. It’s a commercial arrangement where they bring in technical capacity, and we complement with the capability that we have,” Ojulari explained.

He underscored the necessity of this approach by admitting a significant decline in Nigeria’s domestic refining expertise. “If you look at Dangote Refinery and the capabilities of the people running it, a lot of foreign people are there. We may not like it, but we need to review that capability, because we have lost the capability over time,” he said.

The NNPCL boss revealed that simply completing the ongoing rehabilitation is no longer sufficient, as the original plan would produce fuels that are “two steps below current international specifications” and uncompetitive against output from the modern Dangote Refinery.

Consequently, he announced plans to “redesign to a hybrid” system to ensure the state refineries can produce internationally standard products that are commercially viable.

Ojulari cautioned that firm completion dates for the refineries would only be set after the redesign and partnership agreements are finalized.

“The timeline I can give you is that by the middle of next year, we will have agreed and defined the partnerships, the technical partnerships, the new relationship, and the new contracts. Everything will be in place. So I will have a clear roadmap towards the completion of those refineries,” he stated, clarifying the June 2026 deadline is for securing partners, not for the refineries to become operational.

This new timeline continues a long history of efforts to revive Nigeria’s three state-owned refineries in Port Harcourt, Warri, and Kaduna, which have been largely non-operational for over a decade despite billions of Naira spent on maintenance.