Nigeria: Unprofitable Refineries To Be Sold

Government has proposed a National Oil Policy which aims to consolidate oil industry regulatory authorities into a single agency.

The Nigerian government has published a draft National Oil Policy that merges all oil industry regulatory authorities into a single agency known as Petroleum Regulatory Commission (PRC), thereby scrapping all other regulators that include the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) and Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA), Vanguard newspaper reports.

The Ministry of Petroleum Resources last weekend released a document which indicated that the new regulator will incorporate the activities of the existing petroleum regulatory authorities and also cover some new regulatory activities not currently covered. The document reveals that the existing institutional regulatory framework was weak, largely ineffective and inefficient, arising from a number of single-issue agencies; overlaps in regulation, gaps in regulation, mixture of policy, regulation and operations; and ineffective regulation.

The proposed policy also states that each of the country’s refineries will be given a transition period within which to become viable and profitable. It further states that government intends to divest, sell off, concession or if necessary, close down any non-performing refinery that failed to make the transition.

The draft policy is also proposing that, in order to reduce the inefficiencies in parastatals in the petroleum sector, the proposed single petroleum sector regulatory authority will operate under the policy supervision of the Minister of Petroleum Resources.