The Dangote Refinery is an oil refinery owned by Dangote Group that was inaugurated on the 22nd of May 2023 in Lekki, Nigeria. When in full operation, it is expected to have the capacity to process about 650,000 barrels per day of crude oil, making it the largest single-train refinery in the world. The investment is over 19 billion US dollars.
History
Nigerian businessman Aliko Dangote unveiled early plans for the refinery in September 2013, when he announced that he had secured about $3.3 billion in financing for the project. At the time, the refinery was estimated to cost about $9 billion, of which $3 billion would be invested by the Dangote Group and the remainder via commercial loans, and begin production in 2016. However, after a change in location to Lekki, construction of the refinery did not begin until 2016 with excavation and infrastructure preparation, and the planned completion was pushed back to late 2018.
In July 2017, major structural construction began, and Dangote estimated that the refinery would be mechanically complete in late 2019 and commissioned in early 2020. According to Reuters, citing sources familiar with the project, construction was likely to take at least twice as long as Dangote publicly stated, with partial refining capability not likely to be achieved until 2022. An associated project at the site of the refinery, a urea fertilizer factory, was scheduled to begin operation in late 2018 and produce about three million tons of urea annually. In 2018 the project was expected to cost up to $15 billion in total, with $10 billion invested in the refinery, $2.5 billion in the fertilizer factory, and $2.5 billion in pipeline infrastructure.
In July 2022, Dangote - Nigeria's richest resident - had to borrow 187 billion naira (about 442 million USD) at 12.75% resp. 13.5% p.a. to complete the refinery. Fitch Ratings noted that the refinery's start date has been postponed three times in four years and feared diminished investor confidence if operations do not begin in 2023. At the same time, all of the four refineries of the state-owned oil company NNPC (in Kaduna, Port Harcourt and Warri) are idle and expect to process crude oil again in 2023 after "revamping".
In January 2023, the completion of the refinery's power plant was announced. The inauguration is expected to take place at the end of the first quarter of 2023.
In September 2023, the refinery announced that it will start producing Diesel and kerosene in October 2023 and gasoline one month later.
Facility
The refinery is situated on a site at the Lekki Free Trade Zone, Lekki, Lagos State. It is supplied with crude oil by the largest sub-sea pipeline infrastructure of the world (1,100 km long). When fully operational it will provide 135,000 permanent jobs in the region.
High complexity
The Dangote Oil Refinery has a Nelson complexity index of 10.5 which means that it will be more complex than most refineries in the United States (average 9.5) or Europe (average 6.5). (The largest refinery in the world, the Jamnagar Refinery in India, has a complexity of 21.1.) The Nelson complexity index basically increases with the number and capacity of chemical procedures after the distillation, e.g. hydrocracking, NHT, CCR, RFCC, polymerization etc.
Among others, the refinery will run these refinery processes (please find an illustration of the chemical processes in the gallery below):
Superlatives
The Dangote refinery will be the seventh-largest oil refinery in the world (as of 2023, see here).
In 2019, the world's largest crude distillation column, weighing 2,350 tonnes, was installed in place at the Dangote refinery by a specialist Dutch company. With a height of 112 metres it is slightly taller than the Saturn V rocket which brought the first man to the moon (110.6m) and 16 metres taller than Big Ben. In the same year, three more records were set when the world's heaviest refinery regenerator was installed - having already been the "heaviest item ever to be transported over a public road in Africa" at a stately 3,000 tonnes and also being "the heaviest single piece of steel structure" of the world.
Marine facilities
The self sufficient marine facility has the ability for freight optimization. To the marine facilities belong:
2 crude SPM (single point mooring, see image below) for unloading ships from Aframax to ULCC (ultra-large crude carrier) 3 product SPM for product exports up to Suezmax vessels 2 subsea crude pipelines (diameter 48" or 1.22 metres) with interconnection 4 subsea pipelines for products and imports (diameter 24" or 0.61 metres) ca. 120km subsea pipeline