NIGERIA – Dangote Oil refinery, Africa’s largest oil refinery, is anticipated to be completed by the end of 2021 and subsequently commissioned for full operationalisation next year or early 2023.
When completed, the 650,000 barrels per day (bpd) petrochemical and integrated refinery will process a variety of light and medium grades of crude to produce Euro-V quality clean fuels including gasoline and diesel as well as jet fuel and polypropylene.
Aliyu Suleiman, Group Chief Corporate Strategy Officer at Dangote Group made the assertion addressing participants in a webinar held by the Ghana Chamber of Bulk Oil Distributors (CBOD) which sought to give an update on the construction of the oil refinery and the opportunities it offers for Ghana.
The Dangote refinery will increase Nigeria’s refining capacity two-folds and help meet the increasing domestic fuel demand, while generating foreign exchange through exports.
The refinery complex is being developed on a 2,635ha site near the Lekki Lagoon, along the coast of Atlantic Ocean.
The geographical location of the refinery is ideal for easy transshipment of refined petroleum products to the international markets.
The processing facilities for the Dangote refinery include a crude distillation unit (CDU) and associated facilities, a mild hydrocracking (MHC) unit, a residual fluid catalytic cracking (RFCC) unit, a naphtha hydrotreater, and a gasoline hydrodesulfurisation (HDS) unit as well as alkylation units.
The refinery complex will also house sulphur recovery and hydrogen generation facilities and a polypropylene unit. Comprising two steam methane reformer (SMR) units, the hydrogen generation facility will generate 200,000Nm³/h of hydrogen and steam to produce sulphur-free fuels.
The refinery is designed to produce up to 50 million litres of gasoline and 15 million litres of diesel a day.
It is also expected to produce 10.4 million tonnes (Mt) of gasoline, 4.6Mt of diesel, and 4Mt of jet fuel a year.
Additionally, it will produce 0.69Mt of polypropylene, 0.24Mt of propane, 32,000t of Sulphur, and 0.5Mt of carbon black feed.
The Head of Petroleum Pricing at the National Petroleum Authority (NPA), Alpha Welbeck, who noted the operationalisation of the Dangote Oil Refinery will be a game changer and major boost for petroleum retail refinery capacity on the continent, particularly within the West African sub-region.
