A Factorial Study of Bottlenecks in Nigerian Petroleum Refineries

Bottlenecks in the refineries lead to the disruption of refinery operations which result in production loss and time wastage. Nigerian refineries are four and they have not been able to work optimally as they have failed to produce up to their installed capacity. A lot of factors are contributing to this and are known as bottlenecks. This study was taken so as to identify those bottlenecks in the refineries with a view of making them known so that actions can be taken to tackle them and get Nigerian Refineries move from their pariah states to a welcome state. Kendall’s Coefficient of Concordance (K.C.C) and Principal Component Analysis (P.C.A) which are tools in factor analysis were employed. The K.C.C helped in ranking the identified variables according to their order of importance while the PCA helped to achieve parsimony through factor reduction. The results obtained revealed that the experts ranking of the thirty two scale items were in agreement at an alpha level of 0.01 and the computed coefficient of concordance was 0.51which is substantial. The thirty two scale items were able to be reduced into mere five clusters by PCA. A lone variable cluster which was labeled creatively ‘Government interference’ came up trump and account for most of the challenges being experienced in the Refineries. Other clusters labeled creatively were Eclectic issues, organizational management, Supply Chain Architecture and Personnel Management. The import of this is that government interference needs to be removed if refineries are to work optimally and the remaining four clusters should also be looked at in order to tackle these bottlenecks.