Founded in 1972 by Decree 75 of 1972 to train refinery operators, the Petroleum Training Institute, Effurun (PTI) became, over the 1980s and 1990s, the principal Nigerian centre for applied refining research. Its work focused on the catalytic-cracking parameters specific to the light-sweet Bonny Light and Forcados crude blends — particularly the optimisation of zeolite catalyst formulations and operating temperatures for the higher paraffinic content of Nigerian crudes.
Published in the *Petroleum Science and Technology* and *Energy & Fuels* journals through the 1990s and 2000s, the work is technically standard refinery research. What is missing is its industrial application: the Port Harcourt, Warri, and Kaduna refineries — for which the work was, in principle, undertaken — have run at less than 30% capacity for most of the last twenty years, and at 0% for several long stretches.
PTI's training mandate has survived; its research mandate has been chronically unfunded. Most of the trained refining engineers it produces work for the international oil companies or the modular refineries that have proliferated since 2018, where Nigerian-laboratory catalytic-cracking research is not on the procurement list.
The 2024 partial restart of the Port Harcourt refinery, and the Dangote Refinery commissioning at Lekki, may yet create a procurement market for PTI's catalyst work. As of 2026, it has not.