FG Moves To Reduce Trucking Of Petroleum Product

•Engages private security contractor for pipeline surveillance
•Refineries to get external ‘help,’ says Kachikwu
•To use third party financing for refineries repair

The federal government has moved to reduce road transportation of petroleum products with trucks from coastal depots and storage facilities in the country to hinterlands.

Speaking with journalists during his inspection tour to the Port Harcourt Refinery Company (PHRC) on Christmas Day in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu, revealed that government would trim down the country’s dependence on the use of trucks to distribute fuel and rather improve the use of pipelines for product conveyance.

According to him, in the bid to revive pipeline distribution of products, the government has signed up private intelligence firms to augment existing security arrangements on the country’s about 5000 kilometres long stretch of pipeline network.

The efforts, he said, would enable the Pipeline and Products Marketing Company (PPMC), a subsidiary of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), push more products through the pipelines to the hinterlands.
He said that up to 4000 trucks laden with petroleum products ply through the length and breadth of the country’s roads every day to supply petroleum products across board.

This, he said, has continued to impact on Nigeria’s road infrastructure, amongst other impacts.

However, the National Operation Controller of the Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (IPMAN), Comrade Mike Osatuyi, told The Nation that NNPC started massive trucking of supply of petrol to their members since December 24 to address the lingering scarcity across the country. He said over 300 trucks of PMS were supplied by NNPC yesterday.

Kachikwu , who is also the Group Managing Director (GMD) of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), said, “We are bringing in private securities to secure the pipelines. The key is to continue to maintain this and I think we are beginning to get the feel that we are getting some sense of what we need to do.

“It is a combination of many factors: communities, contractors and all sorts, it still makes it expensive but it is better than having to truck them through the roads.”

The Managing Director, Pipeline and Product Marketing Company (PPMC), Mrs. Esther Nnamdi-Ogbue, however, corroborated this position to reporters at the Private Wing of the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja yesterday.

The PPMC, according to her, is now opening up the pipelines and pumping products via them to other different parts of the country.

She said, “There is no going back on the use of pipelines” to distribute petroleum products in the country, adding that the introduction of private security outfits in the pipelines’ security arrangement was beginning to yield results.

“Since the beginning of the fuel scarcity, what we’ve done is to manually track every truck leaving any of our depots either in Lagos; Warri, Oghara or Calabar.

“What we have done is to insist that our pipelines must work. We have an initiative with the private sector to help us secure and maintain our pipelines and that has yielded positive results almost immediately, vandals are being caught.”

The Managing Director added that “We have now started pumping all the way to Ibadan. Our target is to move to Ilorin and that will relieve bridging products from the coastal towns to the hinterlands of the north.

“We are also building a simultaneous effort in Port Harcourt, hoping that it will lead all the way to Markudi to Yola and these are things we have never done before for a long time. We want to have a more efficient way of distributing products nationwide.”

While giving brief details of the new security arrangement for the pipelines, Nnamdi-Ogbue said: “What we had done was that we had the Joint Taskforce who were with us but had not yielded good results and we have private peo