Fuel Price Won’t Be Cheap Even With More Refineries – Ngelale

Ajuri Ngelale, the Senior Special Assistant to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on Public Affairs, recently expressed that increasing the number of refineries in Nigeria would not result in decreased fuel prices. He made these remarks in a recent interview conducted by TVC News.

Ngelale pointed out that a common misconception suggests that operational refineries in the country would automatically lead to affordable fuel costs for Nigerian citizens. However, he emphasized that this notion is far from accurate.

“That is a myth, it does not happen anywhere in the world, even if we had the most refineries producing the most PMS in the world, you would find that the most prolific PMS producers with their refineries do not charge different from the countries without refineries. I am not saying that we should not have refineries, but there are benefits to having working refineries.

“This is why phase one of our Port Harcourt Refinery is coming on stream in December 2023 and phase two by the end of 2024. Dangote Refinery is already up and is going to start dishing out products very soon.
“BUA 200,000 bpd Refinery is coming up in Akwa Ibom, we are going to have an excess supply that we can export internationally.

“The point I am making on this is that the reason why the price at the pump will not go down irrespective of what our refining capacity is as a country is that nobody spends tens of billions of dollars on building a refinery because of charity or corporate social responsibility, they do it to make money.”