The President of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria, PENGASSAN, Festus Osifo, has said the old Port Harcourt refinery is largely rehabilitated and can return to operation within a week, once the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, NNPCL, gives the green light.
Osifo spoke on Tuesday, February 10, during an appearance on Channels Television’s The Morning Brief, revealed that rehabilitation work on the facility has reached approximately 90 per cent completion.
The union leader explained that whilst the refinery is technically capable of processing crude oil immediately, NNPCL’s profit considerations have prevented the company from restarting operations.
“As of today, you can start the old Port Harcourt refinery, and it will function. You can put it on today, and it will function. However, NNPCL as a company is there to make a profit. So, if they want to start it today, within the next one week, they can bring it back to life,” Osifo said.
He identified a fundamental economic problem: running the refinery would currently result in financial losses because the cost of crude oil inputs exceeds the value of the refined products that would be produced.
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“It has been rehabilitated up to about 90 per cent. But the challenge is that if you feed crude oil worth, say, five million dollars into the old Port Harcourt refinery, what you are likely to get at the other end when you sell the petroleum products may be about 4.5 million dollars. So, you put in five million dollars as input and get 4.5 million dollars as output,” he explained.
Despite this operational challenge, Osifo defended the rehabilitation investment, arguing that substantial infrastructure upgrades have made the refinery far more valuable than it was before work began.
“The money that was thrown into the Port Harcourt refinery is not a loss. If you look at the old Port Harcourt refinery, almost all the compressors were changed, the control rooms were changed, and the panels were all changed. The contractors did not take them away,” he said.
The PENGASSAN president stressed that the facility’s current market value significantly exceeds what it was worth prior to rehabilitation.
“In fact, if you value the refinery today, it will be much more valuable than the state it was in before the rehabilitation,” Osifo said.
The Port Harcourt Refining Company briefly resumed operations in November 2024 after undergoing rehabilitation, but was forced to shut down again in May 2025 due to operational difficulties. The facility has remained offline since then.