While Nigeria’s four major refineries are in a state of comatose, Nigeria’s and Africa’s richest man is set to commission his newly built refinery.
Nigeria is largely relying on this refinery to cushion the effect of its petrol subsidy removal coming later in the year.
The Dangote refinery will now be commissioned by President Muhammadu Buhari on May 22.
The date of the commissioning was announced by a presidential aide, Bashir Ahmad. He announced this in a tweet via his official Twitter handle.
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In a tweet on Twitter, Ahmad said: “Efforts by the Federal Government to make Nigeria self-sufficient in local refining of crude oil to save the scarce foreign exchange used in the importation of petroleum products have received a boost”.
Biggest In Africa
Furthermore, Ahmad revealed that “the 650,000-barrels-per-day Dangote Refinery, the world’s largest single-train refinery, is set for inauguration on May 22, 2023, by President Muhammadu Buhari”.
The Dangote Refinery complex is located in the Lekki Free Zone area of Lagos.
It is the biggest in Africa and also the biggest single-train refinery in the world.
A single-train refinery uses an integrated distillation unit or one crude distillation unit to refine crude oil into various petroleum products, as against the use of multiple distillation units by most big refineries.
Dangote announced in late 2013 that his conglomerate had signed an initial $3.3 billion loan deal with local and foreign banks to fund the construction of a new oil refinery in Nigeria.
The refinery was initially expected to start production in 2016 but plans to expand its capacity and a change of location to a 2,500-hectare site in Ibeju Lekki on the outskirts of Lagos led to deadline shift.
In August, news emerged that completion would be further delayed.
Difficulties in importing “steel and other equipment” have been largely blamed for the problem, Reuters reported then.
The President of the Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote, had in January 2022, revealed that its refinery subsidiary would commence processing of crude oil in the third quarter of 2022 but it failed to take off.
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In March, a report by S&P Global said that the delayed commencement of the Dangote refinery meant the continued importation of about 700,000 bpd of diesel in the Sub-Saharan Africa region.
Some experts believe that the facility will meet 100% of the Nigerian requirement of all refined products and also have a surplus of each of the products for export.
