Africa’s giant oil refinery located at the Lekki area of Nigeria’s commercial hub, Lagos will begin operations in December, Aliko Dangote, Africa’s wealthiest man, told Financial Times on Saturday.
The plant, Dangote said, will take delivery of six million barrels of crude oil from the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, NNPCL, and will start with the processing of 350,000 barrels per day.
The US$19 billion (N15,236,480,000,000) facility, which is not yet operational, can produce about 650,000 barrels of petroleum products a day – more than enough to meet Nigeria’s domestic needs with a surplus for export. It also includes a 435-megawatt power station, deep seaport and fertiliser plant.
At full operation, the new oil refinery could save Nigeria billions in foreign exchange currently spent on imported refined petroleum products.
Dangote aims to produce up to 53 million litres of gasoline per day, as well as four million litres of diesel and two million litres of aviation jet fuel daily.
At the commissioning in May after seven years, Nigeria’s former president Muhammadu Buhari described the refinery as “a game changer for the downstream petroleum products market, not only in Nigeria but for the entire African continent.”
The plant is said to be the world’s largest single-train refinery, meaning it has one integrated distillery system which can produce a variety of products and petrochemicals, instead of having different units for each type of product.
“The challenges that we faced, I don’t know whether other people can face these challenges and even survive,” Dangote said, speaking about the journey of embarking on the massive project to boost Nigeria’s struggling oil industry.
“It’s either we sink or we sail through. And we thank the Almighty that at least we’ve arrived at the destination.”
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