A fresh insight has emerged explaining why fuel scarcity and queues have persisted in petrol stations in across Nigeria.
One of the key reasons for this has been identified as inadequate investments in the downstream sector of the petroleum industry.
This insight was given by Peter Mbah, the Chief Executive Officer CEO of Pinnacle Oil and Gas limited at the weekend.
He spoke with State House Press Corps after his company paid a visit to President Muhammadu Buhari, at the Presidential Villa.
While answering a question about how to get the country out of lingering fuel scarcity, Mbah said:”There has been a deficit of the set of investments Pinnacle has done in the last decades. But what we’re doing right now, is to address that stagnation of investment in the downstream oil and gas industry.
“This is an investment size of about a billion dollars. So we are expecting to see more of such investments because what the Pinnacle has done is to create some efficiency in the supply and distribution value chain of the downstream sector.
“So we are indeed expecting that more investment in the downstream sub sector would completely eliminate the sort of scarcity we are witnessing today.”
Mbah is actually the PDP guber candidate in Enugu state.However his company is reported yonhave invested about a billion Dollars in the downstream sector .
His visit to the Seat of Power he said to to show appreciation to President Muhammadu Buhari.
According to Mbah: “We, Pinnacle Oil and Gas limited, have come here to express our profound gratitude and our heartfelt appreciation to Mr. President.
“You will recall that on the 22nd day of October 2022, Mr. President inaugurated our storage terminal adjudged to be the largest storage terminal in West Africa, with offshore intake facilities also adjudged to be the deepest intake facility in the entire Africa, sitting at a water depth of 23 meters.”
He said further, “So we do have SPM (Single Point Mooring), and CBM (Conventional Buoy Mooring).
Those are the offshore facilities we have. Those facilities have the capability to take the largest vessels, you can imagine and discharge over 100 million liters of clean petroleum products within 24 hours.
“This is typically what takes the industry 32 days to discharge. So we have largely come here to express our gratitude to Mr. President, for the honor he gave us in inaugrating this largest facility, which has actually changed the face of the industry, because it has eased as you know, this facility is located at the Lekki free zone, just by the Dangote refinery.
“So what it has done, it has eased the congestion and the gridlock we have at the Apapa area in Lagos. It has also reduced the cost of supply and delivery of petroleum products in different parts of the country. It has also provided jobs for teeming unemployed Nigerians. So this is why we thought it necessary to come and say thank you to Mr. President.”
He is optimistic that with the investments in the sector by his company and other relevant stakeholders, the problem with be over with soon.
