FG meets local refiners over pricing, faults Dangote refinery

The Federal Government (FG) has stated on Tuesday, June 25, 2024, that there was no importation of dirty fuel into the country, contrasting the position of an official of the Dangote Petroleum Refinery.

The FG stated this during a meeting with oil marketers and local refiners of crude oil in Abuja.

Topics discussed were about refined products’ pricing, competition in the industry, and the importation of products that are produced within the country.

The oil marketers asserted during the meeting that though local refineries were producing some of the refined products, they will still patronise other sources, while also buying products from the indigenous producers.

Speaking through the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA), in reaction to claims of dirty fuel importation to Nigeria, the government noted that refined petroleum products with high-sulphur contents were last imported in February, and that this had since been addressed by the regulator.

The Executive Director of NMDPRA, Ogbugo Ukoha, speaking to journalists said: “There is no dirty fuel that is being brought into Nigeria.”

Recall that on Monday, June 24, the Vice-President of Oil and Gas at Dangote Industries Limited, Devakumar Edwin, accused the NMDPRA of granting licences indiscriminately to marketers to import dirty refined products into the country.

He had stated that even though Dangote was producing and bringing diesel into the market, complying with the regulations of the Economic Community of West African States, “licences are being issued, in large quantities, to traders who are buying the extremely high sulphur diesel from Russia and dumping it in the Nigerian market.”

He added, “Since the US, European Union and the United Kingdom imposed a price cap scheme from February 5, 2023, on Russian petroleum products, a large number of vessels are waiting near Togo with Russian ultra-high sulphur diesel and they are being purchased and dumped into the Nigerian market.

“Some of the European countries were so alarmed about the carcinogenic effect of the extra high sulphur diesel being dumped into the Nigerian market that countries like Belgium and the Netherlands imposed a ban on such fuel being exported from its country, into West Africa recently. Sadly, the country is giving import licences for such dirty diesel to be imported into Nigeria when we have more than adequate petroleum refining capacity locally.”

But responding to this, Ukoha, the Executive Director of NMDPRA said, “NMDPRA takes very seriously its statutory mandates to ensure that only quality petroleum products are supplied and consumed in Nigeria. A lot of people do not know the backgrounds that I’m to provide now.

“The ECOWAS heads of states in 2020 endorsed a declaration adopting a fuel roadmap that requires that certain products should have as a minimum 50 parts per million litres of sulphur. Whilst it encouraged almost immediate enforcement against imports to comply with standards, the same treaty deferred enforcements for local refiners up to December 31, 2024.

“Now the PIA (Petroleum Industry Act), when it was passed in 2021, section 317 also captured and upheld these ECOWAS treaties. So as an authority, what have we done since we came into being? We started by engendering compliance. We saw a downward trend up to 2022 till December 2023.

“However, in December 2023 and January this year, we noticed a spike in the sulphur contents of products being imported and we again began strong enforcement from February 1. But I am happy to tell Nigerians that up until June, and till now as we speak, the average sulphur content in every AGO that is brought into Nigeria is below the 50ppm position in the law.”

BEB