The Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority is conducting a digital stock-taking of petroleum products in filling stations across the country. The exercise is beginning with the Federal Capital Territory, from where the regulator intends to extend the count to stations in other parts of the country as part of a closer monitoring of the downstream sector.
According to the authority, the initiative is built around an online platform that it has developed to track, in real time, the daily consumption of fuel by Nigerians. The tool is meant to give the regulator a live picture of how much product is moving through filling stations rather than relying on periodic or manual returns from operators.
The stated purpose of the digital stock-taking and the accompanying platform is to curb hoarding. By keeping a real-time record of the petroleum products held and sold at filling stations, the authority aims to make it harder for stations to hold back supply, a practice that has repeatedly disrupted access to fuel for motorists.
The explanation was given by the executive director for distribution systems, storage and retailing infrastructure, who set out how the regulator is approaching the monitoring of supply at the retail level. The official tied the new platform to the wider effort to bring more transparency to how petroleum products are distributed and consumed nationwide.
Providing context on consumption trends, the executive director recalled that before the full deregulation of the downstream sector, the year-on-year volume of petrol trucked out from every depot was peaking at about 66 million liters a day. That figure served as a benchmark for the scale of daily movement of the product across the country at the time.
With the full deregulation of the downstream sector on 29 May 2023, the official said, the volume dipped to about 50 million liters a day. The authority raised the question of whether that lower figure represents actual consumption, a point the new real-time tracking platform is intended to help clarify as the stock-taking is rolled out.