By Moses Patience Chat
The Chairman of Integrated Oil and Gas Company (IOGC), Captain Emmanuel Iheanacho, has said that marginal refinery owners need an improved environment to encourage the operations of such refineries as a measure to improve services in the oil and gas sector.
Iheanacho said this while speaking at a recent press conference that took place in Lagos, where he also advised Nigerian shipowners operating in the oil and gas marine sub-sector to concentrate on the tanker trade than operating liner services.
According to him, “from my experience, one area we should have just mastered easily, arising from the activities involved in the tanker trade, because the tanker trade is so easy, you carry only one cargo, one Bill of Lading. All you have to do is to be able to take the ship to a port, stop the ship there, load the sip, and sail the ship out of the port and then to another port.
“So, it is not as difficult for instance, as if you were operating a liner service, which requires you to carry thousands of containers, and in each of those containers you have thousands and thousands of small goods and you have the administrative requirement to be able to sort all of those things out and make sure that you go to the port at the right time, and you deliver to the person who owns the cargo, at the right time.”
He noted that there is really a lot that could have been done to harvest and develop the country’s shipping potential, which can still be done.
Iheanacho applauded the efforts of the Maritime Academy of Nigeria (MAN) in Oron, Akwa Ibom State, for providing high-quality training for cadets in the nation’s maritime industry.
He further emphasized on the need for the Maritime Academy’s output to be linked with national capacity, in whose case the need for owning vessels becomes very important.
His words: “Nigeria has done quite well actually in building human capacity. The Maritime Academy of Nigeria, Oron, is there. The Academy provides a good training group for people who wish to pursue a career in the shipping industry.
“ I think that what really should have been done would have been for the Academy’s output to be hooked on to a national capacity where we bought tankers, similar to what we did with the general cargoes vessels in the Nigerian National Shipping Line (NNSL) so many years ago.
“We in the industry have actually put up a campaign to ensure that we participated in the carriage of Nigeria’s trade goods; not only were we supposing that it would allow us to make money, but it would also create the opportunity for us to acquire engineering and technical skills, it would create a perfect opportunity for us to hook on to what is done elsewhere.
“If a Nigerian registered tanker and Nigerian crude tanker picked up cargo from here and to America, what are the standards that are required? So, there are so many things that we are losing, because we were just satisfied with just selling the oil, allowing others would do the job while we would have actually done that job and made a significant profit from participating in that business.”
