Oscarline Onwuemenyi
17 November 2015, Sweetcrude, Abuja – As fuel queues for petrol by motorists at service stations grow longer and more citizens groan under the difficulties of buying petroleum products across major cities, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, on Monday said that its downstream marketing arm, the Pipelines and Products Marketing Company, PPMC, has distributed a total of 25,042,686 litres of petrol to 11 of depots across the country as at Monday.
NNPC last Friday insisted that the country has enough petrol stocks to last for about 35 days going by her average 40 million litres per day consumption rate.
The corporation said in Abuja that its existing record showed that the country had an in-country stock of about 657 million litres of petrol which would last for 16 days, as well as additional 756 million litres supply stock which has been confirmed for delivery into the country’s ports for November.
It however said in a daily petrol distribution record for November 14 and 15 which it sent out, that this much was sent to its depots in Suleja; Kaduna; Kano; Minna; Gusau; Satellite Town; Ilorin; Ore; Ibadan; Gombe and Aba.
Despite the Corporation’s proclamations, commuters in Abuja, the nation’s capital city, continued to experience scarcity of the product, with motorists struggling to get supply from a couple of filling stations that have products to sell.
NNPC insisted that the prevailing fuel queues in some major cities across the country have nothing to do with the lack of supply of petroleum products.
Speaking last week on the status of measures the corporation had initiated to improve on petrol supply and distribution across the country, the Director of Commercial Services of the Pipeline and Products Marketing Company (PPMC), Justine Ezeala said that this much of petrol stock would ensure that petrol supply is buoyant across the country.
He stated that a projected volume of 1.4 billion litres of petrol are available for distribution to fuel stations across the country all through the month of November.
Ezeala informed that as part of the extra measure in place to tackle the artificially induced queues, PPMC has increased the volume of petrol being trucked out to fuel stations across major cities in the country, adding that most of the 37 NNPC Retail Mega Stations across the country have been directed to commence 24-hour service.
“NNPC Retail has 513 retail outlets all over the country and the strategy is that every one of these stations is designed to have products at all times. In addition we have decided that most of the mega stations will adopt 24 hours operation model and where for security reasons that cannot be met, we are going to have extended hours of operation in such location starting from 5am and end till about 10.pm daily,” he said.
He maintained that there was no need for the sudden emergence of queues at filling stations.
PPMC is the downstream subsidiary of NNPC. Ezeala however noted that the country still has challenges in prompt delivery of petrol to all part it because its length of pipeline which would ordinarily take fuel from its storage facilities in Lagos to depots across the country were dysfunctional.
According to him, about 4,397,288 litres of petrol was delivered to the Suleja depot on Thursday for distribution to service stations within its environ; 1,518,989 litres to Kaduna depot; 2,754,125 litres to Kano; 299,992 litres to Minna; 795,001 to Gusau; and 2,975,990 litres to Mosimi depot.
Other depots which received products from its storage facility include Satelite depot with 1,609,960 litres; Ilorin-636,992 litres; Ore-365,000 litres; Ibadan-539,955 litres; Gombe-2,101,742 litres; Benin-1,375,993 litres; Port Harcourt-1,151,811 litres; Aba-840,951 litres; and Enugu-1,399,716 litres. Warri, he noted, received no products for the day.