A new African industrial giant is emerging from the Lekki coastline of Lagos, the Dangote Refinery project, an integrated refinery and petrochemical complex, which is a multi-billion-dollar project that is expected to create a market for $11 billion per annum of Nigerian crude.
At full production, the complex will have an annual refining capacity of 10.4 million tonnes of gasoline, in addition to 4.6MT of diesel and 4MT of jet fuel.
It will also produce 0.69Mt of polypropylene, 0.24MT of propane, 32,000T of sulphur and 0.5MT of carbon black feed. The complex also includes a fertiliser plant, which uses by-products from the refinery as raw materials. These are huge outputs which will also immensely benefit the local market.
The pipeline infrastructure at the refinery is reputed to be the largest anywhere in the world, with 1,100 kilometres to handle 3 billion standard cubic foot of gas per day. The refinery alone has a 400MW power plant that is able to meet the total power requirement of Ibadan DisCo. The Dangote refinery complex covers a land area of approximately 2,635 hectares, which is about six times the size of Victoria Island in Lagos. The Dangote oil refinery is a 650,000 barrels per day, single-train crude oil integrated refinery project located in the Lekki Free Zone in Lagos, Nigeria. With a single crude oil distillation unit, the refinery will be the largest single-train refinery in the world and Africa’s biggest oil refinery.
With a greater capacity than the total output of Nigeria’s existing refining infrastructure, the refinery will meet 100 percent of the Nigerian requirement of all refined products and also have a surplus of each of these products for export.
On a recent tour of the facility, president of the African Development Bank (AfDB), Dr Akinwumi Adesina, described it as the best industrialised project to happen to Africa, adding that the project will positively affect the economic growth and development of not only Nigeria but Africa as a continent.
Adesina stated: “I see a company that I will proudly call Africa’s growth accelerator company. With this project, we see an acceleration of how to reduce imports. We see acceleration on how to have an outbound on export; a value chain development and how to compete regionally and globally.
“I am completely blown away with what I saw here today. This project will reverse the huge sum the nation spends on foreign exchange. When you look at how much we import, it is about $57 billion worth of different products and we export only about $50.4 billion, so we have to balance that with about $7 billion and talking to them here, they showed us that they can have a domestic market of about $11 billion and that is an incredible market and that will save Nigeria about $9 billion dollars a year from importing petroleum products, so this is huge for Nigeria and even for Africa as a continent.”
For more information visit dangote.com
