The Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), has said that with the five refinery plants under construction across the country and seven others, Nigeria will be a net exporter of petroleum products in the next two years.
The Director and Chief Executive Officer of DPR, Sarki Auwalu disclosed this in a statement on Wednesday.
Mr Auwalu stated that the flow of imports will be reversed when the new refineries come on stream in the next two years.
He added that the feat would be achieved through the combined capacity of 375,000 barrels per day from 27 modular refineries, 650,000 barrels from the Dangote refinery, and the 450,000 barrels from the government refineries.
Specifically, he said the Dangote integrated refinery and petrochemical project with 650,000 barrels per day, the biggest in Africa, the Waltersmith refinery with 7,000 capacity per day, and others that were almost near completion would come on stream.
The existing five included the four plants owned by the Federal Government through the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and the one owned and operated by Niger Delta Petroleum Resources.
Auwalu said that the aspiration of DPR was to grow the oil reserve to 40 billion barrels and gas to 210 trillion cubic feet.
He added that the department would also grow oil production from its current 2.4 million capacity to three million production capacity and as well reduced cost of production.
“Currently, we have oil prospective license about 61, more than 2, 000 wells that are producing crude oil and condensate, we have about 125 wells producing gas.
“We equally have 20 floating, loading, and offloading vessels. 28 oil terminals, several float stations, and oil and gas processing factories,” he said.
The director said that none of the functional oil facilities stopped work because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the country maintained production and export.
