Disruption of Aden refineries and inability to export oil... the compound disaster
English - Tuesday 08 August 2023 الساعة 09:01 am
Aden, NewsYemen, Ammar Ali Ahmed:
With the passage of a year since it exported its last shipment, the Yemeni government revealed that it lost its budget of about one and a half billion dollars due to the halting of the oil export process as a result of the Houthi attacks on economic facilities and oil ports in the country, in addition to the contraction of the national economy by half.
Despite these heavy losses, the government and behind it the Presidential Leadership Council are still in a position unable to challenge the Houthi group and resume the oil export process, and confront the Iranian-backed group's blackmail, which aims behind this to impose the sharing of oil revenues.
The presidential impotence is not limited to the military ability to secure the process of resuming exports against Houthi drone attacks, but rather goes beyond taking any alternative measures in this file that will at least stop the bleeding losses incurred by the economy of the liberated areas.
And talking about these alternatives, the possibility of refining oil production and transferring it to the local market, and here, the file of the continuous disruption of the most important vital facilities in the liberated areas, which is represented by the Aden refineries, which have been suspended for 7 years, and the absence of any talk or movement towards this file by the Presidential Council for the past ten months. past.
Despite the old age of the refinery (69) years and the decrease in its refining capacity from 170 thousand barrels / day to about 100 thousand barrels per day, before it stopped. However, this figure remains less than the current production volume of the oil fields, which ranges between 60-70 thousand barrels, according to government statements, which means their ability to fully absorb the current production.
Claims and calls for the need to restart Aden refineries go beyond the situation related to stopping the oil export process, as it has been going on for recent years and is renewed with every collapse of the local currency against hard currencies and the accompanying rise in the prices of oil derivatives imported from abroad, after the refineries used to cover the ratio greater than domestic consumption.
The stopping of refineries and the complete shift to importing oil derivatives from abroad represents one of the factors of pressure on the hard currency and the corresponding weakening of the value of the local currency, as the import bill, according to the latest reports of the Central Bank in Aden, reached about $2.8 billion in 2021, to reach $3.1 billion in 2022.
Large numbers compared to the volume of oil export revenues. According to the bank’s figures, it did not exceed 1.4 billion dollars in 2021, which means that the volume of what the local currency loses against the hard currency due to the process of importing oil derivatives exceeds the volume of the hard currency revenue from the oil export process.
In addition to the acute crisis that the government has been suffering from during the past years and has recently increased, represented in the provision of fuel for power stations in the liberated areas of diesel and diesel, and it can be resolved to a large extent in the case of repeating the current production of oil in Aden refineries.
The management of the Aden Refineries Company, and in previous statements to its officials about the reasons for the failure of its return to work, accused the government of procrastinating in paying the dues for the refinery rehabilitation project and the completion of its electrical station, which is based on a Chinese company.
While the government did not respond publicly to these accusations over the past period, Prime Minister Maeen Abdel-Malik accused the refinery management and the Chinese company operating in the project of manipulating the real cost of the project, in his answers to questions from a parliamentary committee last May.
Moein claimed that the contract price rose from $80 million to $100 and then $140 million. He said that the government paid 115 million dollars without operating the refineries, and that it was later surprised by the existence of an attached contract worth (49) million dollars, pointing out that there is an objection by the Minister of Finance to financing the project, and describes it as "provided in a holed bladder."
