(Ecofin Agency) - The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has announced that it is planning to reduce the country’s importation of petroleum products by increasing the capacity usage of the nation's refineries to 60% by the end of 2017.

According to the Group Managing Director (GMD) of NNPC, Maikanti Baru (photo), NNPC is keen on putting an end to product importation in a few years. He added that a solid plan has been put on ground to achieve that.

“We are putting together various programmes to ensure that we achieve at least 60 per cent local refining by the end of this year. It is the procedure, or methodology, that we are changing a little bit; we are focusing on the process licensors to come and audit our processes and they have already started auditing most of our process units in the various refineries,” he said.

The GMD said that the plan is in addition to other efforts put in place adding that Nigeria should be able to end importation in a few years.

“We hope if we do all these systematically, we should be able to get about 60 per cent level of capacity utilization by the end of this year or, at worst, by the first quarter of 2018 and get to 80 per cent by the end of 2018 so that we would locally be able to supply half of our Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) requirements,” he told Leadership news.

Anita Fatunji