Eighteen days after Mele Kyari, the group chief executive officer (GCEO) of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC), gave a two-week ultimatum, the Port Harcourt refinery in Rivers State is yet to commence production.

On March 15, Kyari met the Senate ad hoc committee investigating various turnaround maintenance (TAM) projects of Nigerian refineries and assured that the Port Harcourt refinery would begin production in two weeks.

He said, “In the next two weeks, production will start. We did mechanical completion of Port Harcourt; that was what we said in December 2023.

“That means we are done with our rehabilitation work; now you are to test if this completion is okay.”

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Kyari said the refinery had taken delivery of 450,000 barrels of crude oil in preparation for production.

He also promised that the Warri and Kaduna refineries would be ready later in the year.

Kyari has promised several times to have the Port Harcourt refinery ready, but on each occasion, the facility has failed to get up and running.

In the middle of 2022, he promised it would be complete by March 2023. In June 2023, he said the refinery would commence production before December 31, 2023. Those deadlines elapsed with no production.