By MacDonald Dzirutwe
LAGOS (Reuters) -Nigeria did not detect a higher-than-usual content of methanol in recent gasoline imports because it did not conduct tests for the additive, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) said on Thursday.
NNPC Chief Executive Officer Mele Kyari said the presence of high methanol quantities was detected in four cargoes in late January that originated from Litasco’s terminal in Antwerp, Belgium. Litasco is the Swiss trading arm of Russia’s Lukoil.
He said the gasoline was imported by four companies – MRS Oil Nigeria, the Emadeb/Hyde/AY Maikifi/Brittania-U consortium, Oando and NNPC subsidiary Duke Oil.
Nigeria’s parliamentarians passed a motion asking state-owned NNPC to suspend and investigate the four firms.
On Wednesday, MRS Oil Nigeria said the gasoline it had received from Litasco was unusable.
Some 350,000 tonnes of gasoline was imported on four tankers: the Torm Hilde, Elka Apollon, Bow Pioneer and Nord Gainer.
After the discovery, NNPC asked trading firms for emergency supplies of gasoline of 500,000 tonnes to replace cargoes that were rejected.
The quality certificates for those cargoes issued at the loading port in Antwerp by AmSpec Belgium indicated that the gasoline complied with Nigerian specifications, Kyari added.
That is because NNPC did not include methanol in its list of specifications prior to this incident, industry sources with direct knowledge said.
“It is important to note that the usual quality inspection protocol employed in both the load port in Belgium and our discharge ports in Nigeria do not include the test for percent methanol content and therefore the additive was not detected by our quality inspectors,” NNPC said in statement on Twitter.
By Thursday afternoon, shortages were easing in Lagos and Abuja as filling stations received more gasoline supplies.
Nigeria is Africa’s biggest producer of crude oil but depends almost entirely on imports to meet its domestic gasoline needs, largely because its refineries have produced little to no fuel over the past decade due to poor maintenance.
“The nation’s refineries should be revamped so that this ugly scenario of being an oil-producing country that imports refined petroleum products could be consigned to the dustbin of history,” Mohammed Monguno, parliament’s chief whip said.
(Additional reporting by Camillus Eboh in Abuja and Julia Payne in London; editing by Edmund Blair, Jason Neely and David Evans)
