The owner and Founder of the Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemical Project, a subsidiary of Dangote Industries Limited, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, has said the refinery would begin to process fuel “soon.” He added that it has secured a license to refine more than 300,000 barrels of Nigerian crude per day. According to Bloomberg, he spoke in an interview yesterday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on the sidelines of the Saudi-Nigeria business roundtable.
He explained that the 650,000 barrel-per-day refinery would start with Nigerian crude instead of foreign crude. Dangote said: “We don’t want to start our refinery with foreign goods. We want to start with the Nigerian crude. We’re more than ready and you will see our gasoline (fuel) products soon.” The nearly $20billion petroleum refinery and petrochemical plant was inaugurated by former President, Muhammadu Buhari in May, 2023.
The refinery, with a capacity to process 650,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd), is sitting on 2,635 hectares of land located in Dangote Industries Free Zone in Ibeju-Lekki, Lagos, and is planned to employ over 100,000 persons. Dangote had during the inauguration said the products of the refinery would be in the market before July or August 2023.
Dangote said: “Our first goal is to ramp up projections of various production to ensure that within this year, we are able to fully satisfy our nation’s demand for higher quality products to enable us to eliminate the tragedy of import dependency and stop, once and for all, the dumping in our market of toxic substandard petroleum products. “Our first products will be in the market before the end of July, beginning of August this year.”
The Dangote Group Executive Director, Devakumar Edwin, in an interview with S&P Global Commodity Insights, had said that the refinery was set to commence operation in October 2023. Though operation commencement at the above-promised dates did not materialise, Dangote in the interview at Riyadh assured Nigerians that the refinery would ‘soon’ commence operation. But Dangote maintained that the refinery would start producing “very, very soon.”
He added that the refinery’s first priority was to supply fuel to Nigeria before exporting elsewhere, including the West African region. According to him, the 650,000 barrel per day facility, which is expected to produce 27 million litres of diesel, 11 million litres of kerosene and 9 million litres of jet fuel, will receive crude from other producers in Nigeria, as well as the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL)..…CONTINUE.FULL.READING>>>
