NNPC Narrows Down to Three Investors/Technical Partners for its Refineries – Africa’s Premier Report on the Oil, Gas and Energy Landscape

Nigeria’s state hydrocarbon company NNPC has junked the option of selling its four crude oil refining plants, located in three states of the country.

After reviewing the  report of the company-wide asset audit and portfolio benchmarking exercise, the NNPC’s incumbent, seven month old executive management and board of directors, decided it was best to get into partnership with companies who could run the facilities, while the NNPC takes a minority, but decisive seat.

The benchmarking exercise was conducted over the course of three months and submitted in September 2025.

In the last six weeks, the company, through the office of its Executive Vice President (EVP) Downstream,, has embarked on a global search for well-heeled and technically honed companies who could invest in, as well as run the refineries, with the NNPC taking a non-operating,  minority stake.

The previous position, now discarded, was  for the Nigerian state to fund the turn around maintenance and hand over the facilities to contracting firms to run, with NNPC having the oversight role.

Africa Oil+Gas Report learns that the negotiations have narrowed the number of likely investor/ technical partners to three, as of the week of November 3, 2025.

NNPC’s two refineries in Port Harcourt, in the east of the country, have been the main focus of the engagements with putative partners and, if it works, the proposal is to proceed to the two other refineries (the Warri Refinery in the mid-west and the Kaduna refinery in the north).

NNPC has -in the last six years- spent considerable energy on refurbishing the refineries, which have total nameplate capacity of 445,000Barrels Per Stream Day (BPSD). The facilities came on stream between 1965 and 1989, but have been largely non performing in the last 15years.

Between 2019 and mid-2023, Nigeria’s cabinet of ministers, known as the Federal Executive Council (FEC), approved a total of approximately $3Bllion for the phased rehabilitation of the four plants in Port Harcourt, Warri, and Kaduna refining complexes. But there have been significant commissioning hitches, despite the fact that the refurbishments have been lled by such bespoke contractors as Marie Technimont of Italy (Port Harcourt plants) and Daewoo Construction of Korea (Warri and Kaduna).

“With that kind of money spent, if we took the decision to sell, we would be stoned on the streets”, one ranking manager in the logistics unit declared. “It will be a massive destruction of value”.

In a recent Linked in post, NNPC’s Group CEO, Bayo Ojulari declared: “We are filled with determination! We are looking ahead with optimism to ensure our refineries operate effectively”.

NNPC sources (no one would speak on record, but this story benefits from interviews with several officials), acknowledge that the emergence of Dangote Refinery, with a name plate capacity of 650,000BPSD and (a lower limit of) gasoline output of 30Million litres a day, is a daunting competition, but Ojulari’s post declared that NNPC was continuing the work of refurbishing the refineries “to ensure  NNPC’s capacity to meet the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA)  requirement as the supplier of last resort for petroleum products”.