Name of the Project
Lekki oil refinery.

Location
Lagos, Nigeria.

Project Owner/s
Dangote Group.

Project Description
The project entails the construction of a new refinery with a capacity of 650 000 bbl/d that will increase Nigeria’s refining capacity to 3.24 million barrels per day.

The refinery is part of a vast petrochemical project that will also house the world’s biggest ammonia plant. Once operational, the facility is intended to curb, or even end, the nation’s dependence on fuel imports.

The refinery and petrochemical complex are located on 25 000 ha of swampy land, with a jetty to ferry products by sea within Nigeria and abroad, including a subsea pipeline to transport gas.

Dangote intends to process different grades of crude to meet local demand for refined petroleum products and also target export markets.

Potential Job Creation
The project is expected to generate thousands of jobs.

Capital Expenditure
The oil refinery will cost about $19-billion.

Planned Start/End Date
Commercial startup of the refinery has been delayed, owing to operational issues at its power plant.

The refinery was officially opened in May 2023 amid uncertainty about how fast it would be able to ramp up.

Latest Developments
The full ramp-up of Africa’s largest oil refinery is still far off.

The refinery just concluded a deal to receive six million barrels of crude from December, an indication that commercial activity is close to getting under way. However, the facility is still several months from full-scale production of fuels, including high-quality gasoline, according to analysts tracking the refinery’s development.

However, according to Bloomberg, a Dangote official has said ramp-up would happen faster than that.

“The refinery is likely to be started up in a phased fashion, with the crude distillation unit being the first unit,” Facts Global Energy analyst Ronan Hodgson has said.

The consultancy expects several months of production of fuel oil and other lower-quality petroleum products, with Euro V — a reference to European emissions standards — gasoline not forecast until the second half of 2024.

“During the initial phase, yields will be highly dependent on feedstock choice. But there will likely be exports of some straight-run products, namely fuel oil and naphtha,” downstream oil industry specialist Citac Africa executive director James McCullagh has said.

The plant’s financiers include several banks and it is “too big to fail, so it is a question of when, not if, it will begin commercial operations in some form,” he has added.

Several traders are unclear about the timeline for Dangote’s full ramp-up and are not expecting it in the next few months.

Dangote Industries group executive director Devakumar Edwin has said it would be incorrect to declare that a full ramp-up will take months or that that first phase would entail mostly naphtha and fuel oil.

“As the saying goes, the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” he has said.

Key Contracts, Suppliers and Consultants
Mammoet (transportation, lifting and installation of all over-dimensional cargo).

Contact Details for Project Information
Dangote Group, tel +234 1 448 0815 or email communications@dangote.com.