Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals has been inaugurated at the Lekki free trade zone area of Lagos state, whilst being the world’s largest single-train refinery with a refining capacity of 650,000 barrels per day.
The refinery sits inside the Lekki Free Zone in Lagos, a 16,500-hectare free trade area, the masterplan for which also contains a proposed airport, a start-up community, and commercial and residential areas.
Worth $20 billion, the giant Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals built by the Dangote Group, which is owned by Africa’s richest man Aliko Dangote, aims to produce up to 53 million liters of gasoline per day, as well as four million liters of diesel and two million liters of aviation jet fuel daily.
Giving the welcome remarks at the event, Aliko Dangote, the visionary of the accomplishment revealed that the first product of the $12 billion facility “will be in the market before the end of July, beginning of August this year [2023]”.
“Beyond today’s ceremony, our first goal is to ramp up production of the various products to ensure that within this year, we’re able to fully satisfy our nation’s demand for higher quality products.
There will be constant availability of high-quality fuels for our transportation sector, the refinery will also make available to our industries vital raw materials for a wide range of manufacturing.
Beyond this, we intend to ensure that our plants are run at the highest capacity of utilisation and the highest efficiency to enable us to export competitively to other markets, especially in the ECOWAS and wider regions in which 53 countries out of 55 are dependent on imports to meet their petroleum products demand.
We have built a refinery with a capacity to process 650,000 barrels per day in a single train — which is the largest in the world … We decided on a plant designed with state-of-the-art technology and a scale in a capacity that will be a game-changer in Africa and the global market.”
Around 50% of the funds used to build the refinery came from Dangote’s equity investment while the other half came from debt finance from banks such as Access and Zenith banks.
The refinery is expected to solve some of Nigeria’s petroleum issues. Despite being an oil-producing nation and one of Africa’s largest oil producers, Nigeria lacks the capacity to refine its oil.
A large number of these products that exist in the West African country are imported from other nations like India, Belgium, UAE, and the Netherlands.
