Dangote raises refinery’s capacity to 650,000bpd

AFRICA’S richest man and President of Dangote Group Aliko Dangote has announced that he is increasing his refinery’s capacity to 650, 000 barrels per day.

The move, according to petroleum industry analysts,  will see Nigeria listed as having the largest petroleum refinery in the world.

Dangote said that though the initial plan was to have 450,000 bpd refining capacity, but that he has since gone back to the drawing board to have a bigger plant because he believes that Nigeria as a leading producer of crude oil should also be credited with local refining capacity.

Describing the situation where Nigeria produces crude, but goes abroad to buy refined products as unacceptable, Dangote, who spoke through his Group Executive Director, Devakumar Edwin, said Dangote refinery was ready to reverse the trend just as it had successfully done in other sectors like sugar and cement.

His clarification came as the company’s Executive Director in charge of Stakeholders Management and Corporate Corporation, Manure Ahmed,  told stakeholders in South Africa that the refinery would run full swing as from 2017.

Edwin, who spoke while receiving on behalf of Dangote, a group of oil and gas stakeholders who paid him a visit in Lagos at the weekend, also said the petrochemicals, which is being developed alongside the refinery, also had its capacity increased from 750,000 to 3.6 million.

“The entire petrochemical industry is history. Nobody has started with a 3.6 million tonnes capacity anywhere in the world. We are doing two million tonnes of polypropylene and 1.6 tonnes of polythene, which is approximately 3.6 million tones, which is a huge petrochemical complex.

“The consumption of petrochemical products in Nigeria and within Saharan Africa is quite limited today. But in the future, there will be growth. if the cement industry has not developed like this today, if we were still living with a 3.4 million tonnes per annum capacity, today we would have imported about 16 million tonnes of cement and with that, you can imagine if we had imported this, it would have cost the country $2 billion of foreign exchange.

“So that much of foreign exchange has been saved by the country and we can imagine how much of billions of dollars the country is spending in importation of products. That much of enormous foreign exchange has been conserved and the petrochemical products are exported, it will yield a huge amount of foreign exchange for the country even for us today, we are so happy and relieved that our external investment in cement has started to yield returns this year we will be able to bring back foreign exchange in terms of our earnings from these investments.”

He also dismissed fears that change in government policy could affect the business saying “we have witnessed so many political upheavals and never had any negative impacts on our business as such because our business is not dependent on any government contracts or any linkage to the government. Fortunately, for the businesses we are in and the way we carry out risk analysis, we go through a rigorous analysis before we carry out any investment. One of the reasons why we carry out this very rigorous risk analysis is because most of the investments comes from president’s pocket and  because he makes massive investment and obviously, he will not want his investments to be wiped out because of one mistake.”