On Tuesday, the Federal Government refuted the recent assertion made by a Dangote Petroleum Refinery official that there was no unclean fuel imported into Nigeria.
This was announced following a meeting in Abuja with local crude oil refiners and oil marketers. During the discussion, topics covered included the price of refined products, competition, and the importation of Nigerian-made goods.
During the conference, local refineries were manufacturing some refined products, but it didn’t stop marketers from purchasing products from indigenous producers and going through other sources.
In response to allegations of the importation of dirty fuel into Nigeria, the government, through the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority, said that refined petroleum products with high sulphur contents were last imported in February and that the regulator had since taken care of the matter.
This was revealed to journalists by Ogbugo Ukoha, Executive Director of Distribution Systems, Storage and Retailing Infrastructure at NMDPRA, following the regulator’s meeting with local crude oil refiners and oil marketers, which included representatives from the Dangote refinery and modular refineries.
“There is no dirty fuel that is being brought into Nigeria,” Ukoha declared when asked to react to the allegations levelled against the NMDPRA by a senior official of the Dangote refinery.
On Monday, news surfaced that Devakumar Edwin, Vice President of Oil and Gas at Dangote Industries Limited, had accused the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority of arbitrarily awarding licences to importers of refined products that were unclean.
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.”
Edwin had explained, “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.”
To stop the flow of unclean fuels into Nigeria, the Federal Government’s agency responded to this on Tuesday by insisting that it has implemented all the prescribed procedures needed for the importation of refined petroleum products.
It went on to say that refineries in Nigeria were also making efforts to ensure that the refined goods they produced met the standards that ECOWAS had authorised for the area.
Ukoha 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.”
With the local refiners, Ukoha stated that the declaration deferred it, adding, “So they continue to produce at a higher level, but we are not very anxious about that because even the new refineries that are coming in have within the design of their plants, the sulphurisation units that will see in the nearest future that sulphur goes down to as low as 10ppm.
