Mr. Devakumar Edwin, Vice President of Oil and Gas at Dangote Industries Limited (DIL), has accused Nigerian international oil companies (IOCs) of frustrating Dangote Oil Refinery and Petrochemicals through crude oil price manipulation and sabotage.
Edwin made the serious charge while speaking to a group of energy editors at a Dangote Group-organized one-day training programme.
Edwin said the IOCs are intentionally obstructing the refinery’s efforts to purchase local crude by manipulating premium prices above market rates, compelling the refinery to import crude from distant countries like the United States, leading to significantly higher costs.
“While the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) is trying its best to allocate the crude for us, the IOCs are deliberately and willfully frustrating our efforts to buy the local crude.
“It would be recalled that the NUPRC recently met with crude oil producers as well as refinery owners in Nigeria in a bid to ensure full adherence to Domestic Crude Oil Supply Obligations (DCSO), as enunciated under Section 109(2) of the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA). It seems that the IOCs’ objective is to ensure that our petroleum refinery fails.
“It is either they are deliberately asking for ridiculous/humongous premium or they simply state that crude is not available. At some point, we paid $6 over and above the market price.
“This has forced us to reduce our output as well as import crude from countries as far as the US, increasing our cost of production,” Edwin said.
Persecondnews recalls that the Chairman of the Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote, said international oil companies in Nigeria are not ready to sell crude oil to the 650,000-barrel capacity oil refinery.
Dangote made this disclosure in an interview with CNN.
According to him, the international oil companies were used to exporting crude for foreign exchange, and they were not ready to stop.
Dangote said though the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Ltd. was doing its best to supply feedstock to the refinery, the IOCs wanted to sell outside the country.
“The NNPC Ltd. is doing its best, but some of the IOCs, they are struggling to give us crude; everybody is used to exporting, and nobody wants to stop exporting,” he stated.
The business mogul said Africa was not growing because it sells raw materials to the Western world and buys the same as finished goods.
He said: “Africa is not going the way it should because we export raw materials and import finished goods. It doesn’t matter what it is; even if it is gold or whatever, raw material is always priced at a ridiculous amount compared to finished goods.”
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