The Dangote Refinery, founded by Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, is set to open on May 22.
According to presidential adviser Bashir Ahmad, the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (ret. ), will perform the inauguration.
“Efforts by the Federal Government to make Nigeria self-sufficient in local refining of crude oil to save the scarce foreign exchange used in the importation of petroleum products have received a boost,” Ahmad stated in a tweet on his handle. President Muhammadu Buhari is slated to inaugurate the world’s largest single-train refinery, Dangote Refinery, on May 22nd, 2023.”
“Save the date, Monday, May 22, 2023, for the official commissioning of Dangote Oil Refinery and Petrochemicals FZE,” according to an invitation.
The Dangote Refinery Complex is located in Lagos’ Lekki Free Zone. The refinery is Africa’s largest and the world’s largest single-train refinery.
In contrast to most large refineries, a single-train refinery uses an integrated distillation unit or one crude distillation unit to refine crude oil into various petroleum products.
In late 2013, Dangote revealed that his business had inked an initial $3.3 billion financing agreement with local and global banks to fund the construction of a new oil refinery in Nigeria.
The refinery was originally scheduled to begin production in 2016, but plans to expand its capacity and a relocation to a 2,500-hectare site in Ibeju Lekki on the outskirts of Lagos pushed the completion date to late 2019, with production beginning in 2020.
In August, it was revealed that the completion date would be pushed back even more. Reuters noted at the time that difficulties in importing “steel and other equipment” were mostly to blame for the difficulty.
Aliko Dangote, the President of the Dangote Group, announced in January 2022 that its refinery unit will begin processing crude oil in the third quarter of 2022, but it never took off.
According to a March analysis by S&P Global, the delayed start-up of the Dangote refinery meant that the region’s diesel imports remained at around 700,000 bpd.
Some experts estimate that the facility will meet 100% of Nigeria’s refined product requirements while also having a surplus of each commodity for export.