President Muhammad Buhari, will on Saturday commission the Pinnacle Oil and Gas FZE Terminal in Lekki, Lagos Nigeria.
The terminal, according to the company, is an ultra-modern purpose-built products intake, storage and off-take facility conceptualised to revolutionise the Nigerian downstream oil and gas industry by enabling the direct delivery of petroleum products from large vessels which would otherwise have been unable to berth anywhere on the Nigerian coastline.
Peter Mbah, chief executive officer of Pinnacle, who disclosed this in a press briefing, also explained that the terminal is a resilient infrastructure capable of importing and exporting through the same pipeline while adding that it will transform the whole downstream value chain.
“What we built is actually resilient infrastructure because it has a bi-directional capability to import and export products from the same pipeline and the same facilities in the open sea,” Mbah said.
Also, the CEO said Nigeria may become a net exporter of refined petroleum products with investments going on in the space.
According to him, “We are also one of those that believe that overtime, with the investment we are seeing in the refining space, Nigeria may become a net exporter of refined petroleum products which is why we are fortunate to have built our facility very close to a big refinery.”
Read also: $1b Pinnacle FZE terminal will address inefficiencies in downstream sector
Speaking about Pinnacle operations, Mbah stated that the company operates majorly on the business-to-business (B2B) space rather than business-to-customer (B2C) and that’s why they have fewer stations around.
“We are today the leaders of the market in terms of volume and market share, with a market share of 23 percent. In the downstream space, you have companies that are buyers towards B2C and those that are buyers towards B2B. In our own space, we refer to ourselves as master suppliers. Perhaps, you may not see a number of stations bearing Pinnacle but we are the suppliers of those products. We are more interested in the B2B space. We deal with B2B rather than B2C. It’s a deliberate strategy.”
Mbah stated that the decision to build the disruptive facilities was informed by the company’s willingness to address the inefficiencies in the downstream sector, which had led to numerous issues in receiving products from mother vessels using daughter vessels with cost implications.
Meanwhile, the company explained that the facility has in effect improved the efficiency of the Nigerian downstream industry by eliminating the need for expensive vessel lightering, reducing the incidence of demurrage for visiting mother vessels, reducing the typical outturn losses which typically occur during lightering operations etc. All of these have resulted in significant savings for vessels berthing at the Terminal as opposed to berthing at any of the other mooring facilities in the Lagos area.
