NNPC: Nigerian Consumes 33million Litres of PMS Daily, Spent N800Billion on Imports in 2009

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has faulted the nation’s daily consumption figure of premium motor spirit which has been put at 30million litres, saying that on the contrary, its recent findings showed that the nation consumes about 33million litres.
Group Managing Director of NNPC, Mohammed Barkindo made the disclosure at the recent unveiling of the organisation’s transformation strategy. He said that the wrong figure is largely responsible for the persistent fuel scarcity in the country.
According to him, the frequent domestic petroleum products scarcity has been traced to a combination of factors, namely:  inaccurate forecasting on national consumption level, non-supply of crude oil to refineries and the role of multiple players in the downstream sector. 
He said the nation’s refineries have failed to perform because of lack of supply of crude to them. "In terms of refinery downtime, in 2009, capacity utilisation was 13 per cent, compounded by actual PMS yield of 18 per cent, compared to the planned yield of about 30 per cent”.
The main root cause of this downtime was lack of crude supply to the plants. These refineries cumulatively lost N25billion in revenue. As a result of the refinery downtime, we have increased imports from the 50 per cent we were providing to almost 100 per cent at staggering cost of N800billion,"he said.
Barkindo declared at the event that the wrong forecast has led government into making wrong judgement for almost  six years as it relies on false national consumption figures with regard to supply of PMS and diesel products.
"For nearly six years, we had figures that could not be justified. We kept on relying on the figure of 30 million litres as daily demand of PMS for the country despite population growth of nearly three per cent and GDP growth. Therefore, the 30 million growth cannot be relied upon," he said.
Recent figures of product volume released into the domestic market by NNPC War Room committee set up to arrest fuel scarcity in the country showed that the country consumes well over 33million litres of PMS as against the 30million being used as benchmark.