The thick fumes of smoke, high traffic of petrol tankers and the crowd of activities around the Kaduna Refinery and Petrochemical Company KKPC had been one of the major characteristics of residents around. This is undoubtedly, the highest government investment of the north Niger and Benue state. Over the past months, the busyness of this area had declined and residents seeks to know the reason. Well our correspondent had gone there and gathered some informations.
The Managing director, (MD) of the petroleum company Engr Saidu Mohammed a chemical engineer seems to have found the question thrown at him by the interviewer funny. This was obvious when he laughed heartily from behind the table in his luxurious office.
His reply to the question was this “Don’t worry that you don’t see the usual fire rising out smoke which makes people know that we are producing, for now, we are steaming and that is what is the most important part of the production”.
The MD explained that the refinery was going through some kind of rehabilitation, an effort to use only Nigerian trained engineers only and that offcourse the refinery is still producing oil. He later began narrations of the ongoing effort to reposition the status of the company to optimum. thus he used the term TAM-Rehab instead of shutdown.
Mr Mohammed explained what he meant by TAM-Rehab as Turn Around Maintenance-Rehabilitation. he went on to say that as this is going on, the company is trying as much as possible not to shutdown the entire refinery. He also said that the whole essence is to show that they are doing that which people thought they neglected and also using the opportunity to fix troublesome machines by making procurement order for the government to fix them.
Stating that as the parts come, they rehabilitate and also, as the new ones came, they install and that is the overall importance of the TAM-Rehab. He also mentioned that the whole process will take a period of at least 18 months.
“Not only did we give ourselves a time target of a year and half but we also picked up the challenge that we would do all we can to take the refinery from the present operating level of 60% to as high as 90%.
“As a matter of fact, we may decide to push it higher than 80% before now, but then we would be doing it just to test, because we cannot sustain it for long.
Mr Mohammed said that the company on a mini TAM have almost completed its Target but did not make noise about it. "We call it mini TAM because we are doing it in phases Under the fuel section, the crude distillation unit, the naphtha hydrating unit, the FFC, and every other unit involved" he confidently said that there is no heat exchanger that they had not fixed, cleaned or replaced.
He said that all columns have been serviced and all damages in them taken care of. Pumps and compressors has been completely repaired and fixed. the MD said the TAM is just like checking for faults in a car engine detecting the bads and then take care of them.
He said out of the four phases in the refinery, two have been completed and even the remaining two which for now are not a priority belongs to the other section of the refinery that controls foreign crude. But the ones that are supposed to produce Liquid Petroleum Gas, LPG, gasoline, kerosene, diesel and fuel oil, are good to go.
More-so he said the major problem we are facing is the epileptic supply of crude oil. The warri crude oil allocated to them by the government have been breached by the indigens thus their pipelines have been bridged and vast sections have been tampered with causing setbacks in production and refining.
Mean while, we are relying on the little crude oil that we have left in our oil well and the little being pushed through the tampered pipeline to keep our engine running and not remain idle.
No comments:
Post a Comment