The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr . Ibe Kachikwu, says the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, has reduced its importation of Premium Motor Spirit, otherwise known as petrol, from about 95 per cent to 50 per cent.
Kachikwu, who however, disclosed that the downstream and midstream sector continues to face challenges, urged Nigerians to start moving away from the use of products like petrol , kerosene and diesel to using liquefied petroleum gas .
The minister disclosed this in a podcast message posted on his Facebook page on Saturday.
He said; “The reality is that all over the world everybody is moving to cleaner fossils . LPG provides that for us , gas does the same for us . So we need to begin to look at how we can install pipelines for LPG and take it to places of its consumption, where we can have vehicles that have the capability to potentially use gas in order to reduce PMS usage.”
To achieve this , Kachikwu said the government would collaborate with stakeholders in the sector in order to effectively meet its long- term target in the sector.
The minister had noted that the government had eliminated subsidy payments to oil marketers substantially , but stressed that the downstream oil sector had continued to encounter challenges.
Kachikwu said; “There isn’ t fuel scarcity , we are not short of products , but yet the downstream and midstream sectors continue to remain challenged . And what we are going to do is to analyse what we have done so far and begin to throw solutions to some of these challenges .
“When we first moved in , we had refineries that were not producing, fuel subsidy issues of almost N15 bn monthly expenses, massive diversion of petroleum products across borders . We are consuming about 50 million litres of products at the time, but that substantially has reduced now .
“We had issues of pricing efficiency and governance, for at that time the prices we were selling at were so ridiculously below what the sustainable prices are. And you find a situation where basically marketers disappeared from the industry . So we had massive shortages, queues and everything seemed to be breaking down . We ’ ve since come out from that . ”
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