Come March 2016, Nigeria plans to change crude oil swap deals and introduce a new system whereby it will buy and sell crude oil to refiners directly, The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) revealed.

Even though Nigeria exports approximately 2 million bopd, it solely depend on imported gasoline, kerosene and other petroleum products. The country’s move to renovate the long abandoned refineries have been unsuccessful.

NNPC had said in November 2015, that it would deviate from swap agreements (offshore processing arrangements), so as to improve transparency.

“The crude-for-products exchange arrangement popularly referred to as crude swap will be replaced by a Direct-Sale–Direct-Purchase (DSDP) arrangement which would take off next month,” NNPC spokesman Ohi Alegbe told Reuters.

He added that minister of state for petroleum resources had announced this when he appeared before a parliamentary committee created to investigate NNPC’s swap arrangements.

“The minister stated that the DSDP option eliminates all the cost elements of middlemen and gives the NNPC the latitude to take control of sale and purchase of the crude oil transaction with its partners, adding that the initiative would save $1 billion for the federal government,” he said.

Anita Fatunji