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The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has recommenced operations at its Port Harcourt refinery in an effort to ease the ongoing fuel crisis, according to NNPC’s spokesman, Garba Deen Muhammad, who spoke with reporters on Tuesday.

Muhammad said the Port Harcourt refinery resumed operations last week and has been producing between three to five million litres of petrol daily.

The Port Harcourt and Kaduna refineries were shut down in January after vandals attacked the major pipelines connecting the refineries to crude oil terminals.

NNPC has four refineries – two in Port Harcourt, one in Kaduna, and another in Warri. They have a combined installed capacity to produce 445,000 barrels of crude oil per day.

“We expect Kaduna refinery to begin any time soon and we also have vessels discharging fuel and so, all these combined measures will bring down the situation,” Muhammad said.

Nigeria has been facing one of the worst fuel crises in recent times partly due to a government policy to increase NNPC’s import quota of refined petroleum products, and also partly due to the challenge by independent oil marketers to access foreign exchange.

Last week, Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu, the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, said oil majors such as Shell, Total, Mobil, etc agreed to provide $200 million in forex to help independent marketers import petroleum products.

“When you have this kind of situation, people will naturally get agitated but people are getting calm now because they know the supply gap has now been bridged, and it is a question of distribution now,” Muhammad said.