Dangote Refinery Secures Licence To Refine 300,000bpd Crude

Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, has said that his refinery has acquired a licence to refine more than 300,000 barrels of Nigerian crude per day and will begin processing petrol soon.

“We don’t want to start our refinery with foreign goods, we want to start with Nigerian crude,” Dangote said in an interview with Bloomberg in Riyadh on the sidelines of the Saudi-Nigeria business summit. “We’re more than ready and you will see our gasoline products soon.”

The refinery was meant to begin production in August, but it missed that deadline, as well as several others over the years. Dangote, on the other hand, claims that his refinery will begin production “very, very soon.”

According to him, the refinery’s first objective is to deliver gasoline to Nigeria before exporting to other countries, especially the West African region.

Devakumar Edwin, Group Executive Director at Dangote, in an interview with S&P Global Commodity Insights said that the Dangote Petroleum Refinery was importing crude oil and expecting its first cargo in about two weeks.

Although the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited markets crude oil on behalf of Nigeria, Edwin revealed at the time that the NNPC had committed its crude to other organisations.

He did not reveal the other entities receiving the oil company’s crude, but the NNPC had previously stated in August that it had entered into a $3 billion crude oil-for-loan contract with the African Export-Import Bank.

The 650,000 barrel-per-day facility, which will produce 27 million litres of diesel, 11 million litres of kerosene, and nine million litres of jet fuel, will receive crude from other Nigerian producers as well as the country’s state oil company, according to Dangote, whose fortune is valued at $16.2 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.