‘How we built mini-refinery from locally sourced materials’
Prof. Ibrahim Ali Mohammed-Dabo of the Department of Chemical Engineering, Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Zaria who is leading a mini-refinery development research team, sheds light on the facility which is the first locally built refinery in Nigeria.
Could you give us details about the configuration, technology, product yield and location of the ABU Mini-Refinery (ABUMR)?
The product slate of the ABU Mini-refinery consists of petrol, kerosene and diesel fractions which are obtained from the atmospheric distillation column of the plant whereas the vacuum column yields Light and Heavy vacuum gas oils.
The petrol, diesel and kerosene fractions are referred to as the straight run fractions and some form of treatment has to be conducted on them prior to their utilisation as fuels. The fractions from the vacuum column can serve directly either fuels or as feedstock to our fluid catalytic cracking unit (FCCU) under construction.
The refinery is located within ABU Zaria main campus. The university management, after thorough consideration of the various locations and studying our preliminary environmental impact assessment (EIA) came up with the present location.
The plant site is bounded to the east by the Centre for Energy Research and Training (CERT), ABU Zaria; northwards by the ABU Refuse dump site and westwards by the road leading to Koraye village. You can see that the plant has no direct proximity with either the academic or residential areas of the campus.
The university has hugely invested in the project ranging from clearing the site, to its fencing and provision of both electricity and water supply to the site.
What was the motivation for starting the project and what bottlenecks were encountered in sourcing raw materials, human capital and regulatory approvals for the project?
One of the refineries located in Kaduna was built by Chioda, a Japanese Chemical Engineering Company. Ironically Japan is not an oil producing country but has invested hugely and developed a petroleum refinery technology exporting it to other countries.
Another motivating factor is that whenever some components or sections of the Nigerian state-owned refineries develop faults the original designers have to be called upon to rectify the problems.
As a result of these and many more reasons, the Chemical Engineering Department of ABU Zaria decided to take the bull by the horn and initiate domestication of this technology. We started the project concept in 2001 by challenging the students to design a hydro skimming refinery as their Final Year Design project. Many researches were conducted at the laboratory scale and in 2011, postgraduate students were involved in the project leading to the design of 1000 barrels of Escravous crude per day.
After the design, we were faced with paucity of funds to go into fabrication of this capacity as such the plant capacity was scaled down to a barrel per day which was successfully built, assembled and operated.
The materials (metals) used for constructing the refinery components were locally sourced from Kano, Kaduna, Port Harcourt and Lagos. These materials of construction were tested for integrity and certified by the departments of Mechanical and Metallurgical Engineering.
However, some controls hardware were imported from Hong Kong. What is interesting to note with regards to the controls is that, the design aspect was done by staff and students of the Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department of our university. Specification and installation of these imported controls hardware were done by staff and students of that department.
Concerning the manpower for the refinery, the ABU Minirefinery Development Team, is multidisciplinary consisting of staff from all the departments in the Faculty of Engineering and some staff from Faculties of Science and Environmental design departments. The university, however, has employed some technical staff solely dedicated for the Minirefinery who are competent in welding and pipeline assembly.
Presently, we don’t have problems with approvals from the regulatory agency (DPR). This is because we are yet to reach the stage of perfecting the technology and its patenting.
What is hindering our rapid progress is funding. We have built the crude distillation unit consisting of a desalting unit and atmospheric and vacuum distillation units and Raw Materials Research and Development Council is sponsoring the development of Naphtha hydrotreating (NHU) and Fluid Catalytic Cracking (FCCU) units. Installation of the last two units has reached an advanced stage. We are in talks with the Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) and we are hopeful that very soon they will partake in the project as this is directly within their mandate.
How will the mini-refinery economically impact on the university, the state and the country at large?
The economic impact of this project can be stratified as short-term and long-term. The short-term impact entails the immediate utilisation of the plant for training young engineers in refinery operations.
The long-term economic impact of the project comes after perfecting the technology and going commercial. At that stage many private investors may engage the university to build refineries for their companies and by so doing the university will benefit financially.
This is possible because for sure when we reach that stage (which will be very soon), constructing the refinery locally will be by far cheaper than the imported ones. For example, the present cost of building a petroleum refinery depending on the size, configuration and products slates ranges between 500 million and 9 billion US dollars.
Another long-term impact of the refinery to Nigeria is that the country will be among the countries that have developed and domesticated petroleum refinery technology. It will interest you to know that of recent Iran and Turkey have successfully commissioned their locally built conventional oil refineries. In fact, Turkey has already started exporting their technology by building refineries in other countries like Syria.
This ABU mini-refinery is the second refinery housed within a university globally. The first is in Spain. Many universities have facilities for oil and gas related teaching, research and development but domiciled in laboratories unlike our own which is completely in the field mimicking the real industrial set-up.
We understand feedstock for the refinery will come from KRPC. Are there other alternatives whenever KRPC is down and how will the crude feedstock be transported to the mini-refinery?
For now, the Minirefinery utilises Escravous crude obtained from Kaduna refinery. Initially there was a problem with obtaining crude from Kaduna Refinery but thanks to the generosity of the Kaduna refinery management we are now getting crude supply whenever they have enough in stock. Presently we rely solely on supply from KRPC and we don’t have alternative arrangement.
How much has it cost the university to assemble and install the refinery so far?
In monetary terms, the project has engulfed about N20 million so far. This amount does not include cost of the land where the plant is sited and various logistics put in place and maintained by the university.