The Africa’s Business Mogul, Aliko Dangote, has said his refinery has secured a licence to refine more than 300,000 barrels of Nigerian crude per day and will begin to process gasoline soon.
“We don’t want to start our refinery with foreign goods, we want to start with the Nigerian crude,” Dangote said in an interview in Riyadh on the sidelines of the Saudi-Nigeria business roundtable, according to Bloomberg.
“We’re more than ready and you will see our gasoline products soon,” he added.
The refinery was supposed to start production in August but missed that target in addition to several other over the years. But Dangote insists that his refinery will start producing “very very soon.”
The refinery’s first priority is to supply gasoline to Nigeria before exporting to elsewhere, including the West African region, he said.
The Dangote Petroleum Refinery was importing crude oil and expected its first cargo in about two weeks, according to the Executive Director, Dangote Group, Devakumar Edwin.
Edwin stated that though the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited trades crude oil on behalf of Nigeria, in an interview with S&P Global Commodity Insights at the time, he revealed that the NNPCL had committed its crude to other entities.
The Dangote refinery boss did not disclose the other entities receiving the oil company’s crude, but the NNPCL had earlier disclosed in August that it had entered into a $3bn crude oil-for-loan deal with African Export-Import Bank.
The 650,000 barrel-a-day facility, which is expected to produce 27 million litres of diesel, 11 million litres of kerosene and nine million litres of jet fuel, will receive crude from other producers in Nigeria, as well as the country’s state oil company, said Dangote, whose fortune estimated at $16.2bn by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
