Sam Ikeotuonye
Lagos — The Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority, NMDPRA, has said there is no dirty fuel in the country and that it would not encourage the entry of dirt fuel in the country.
NMDPRA’s Executive Director of Distribution Systems, Storage and Retailing Infrastructure, Ogbugo Ukoha, stated this on Tuesday in a chat with newsmen shortly after a meeting with oil marketers and local refiners officials at the headquarters of the Authority in Abuja.
He spoke in response to claims made by the Dangote Refinery over importation of dirty fuel into the country by fuel marketers. .
The management of Dangote Industries was reported to have said that the NMDPRA has been granting licenses indiscriminately to marketers to import what it (the management) described as ‘dirty refined products’ into the country”.
“There is no dirty fuel that we would encourage to come into Nigeria. And there is no dirty fuel being brought in,” Ukoha said in a reaction to the allegation.
He maintained that the NMDPRA was serious in carrying out its statutory mandate and ensuring that only quality petroleum products are supplied and consumed in the country, referring also to a declaration in 2020 by the heads of state of the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, adopting the Afri-5 fuel roadmap that requires that certain products have minimum 50 parts per million litres of sulphur.
Ukoha, who said section 317 of the Petroleum Industry Act, PIA, 2021 also upheld the ECOWAS treaty, stressed that the Authority, when it came into being, started by engendering compliance with the provisions of the treaty.
The NMDPRA Executive Director said: “As an authority, what have we done since we came into being? We started by engendering compliance. We saw a downward trend up to December 2023. In December and in January of this year, we noticed a spike in the sulphur contents of products being imported. And we again now began strong enforcement from 1 February.
“I am happy to tell Nigerians that up until as we speak in June, the average sulphur content in every Automotive Gas Oil (AGO) that is brought into Nigeria is far below, the average is far below what the 50 ppm provision is in the law.
“With the local refineries, remember that declaration deferred it and 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 their design of the plant desulphurisation units that will see in the nearest future that sulphur going down as low as 10 ppm,”
He added: “There is no dirty fuel that we would encourage to come into Nigeria. I said there is no dirty fuel being brought in and I have given you the statistics for June. What we have on the average from imports have continued to go down from 200 on the average ppm and now we have it far below the 50 ppm that is in the law, provided under the law.
“And then with the refineries, there is no need to enforce that until the end of this year. But they themselves are already taking steps to see that is also guaranteed,”
