President, Dangote Group, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, has said his oil refinery which is expected to come on stream in 2017 will process 650,000 barrels of crude oil per day. The completion of the plantwill see Nigeria having one of the largest petroleum refineries in the world, Dangote said in a statement on Sunday.
According to him, altthough the initial plan was to have 450,000bpd refining capacity, he had to gone back to the drawing board to enlarge the plant.
The plant will over 200,000 bpd refining capacity above the current domestic capacity of about 450,000bpd, which even at is often operating at far lower capacity.
Dangote said Nigeria as a leading producer of crude oil should also be credited with similar local refining capacity. According to him, the present situation where the country produces crude oil but goes abroad to buy refined products is unacceptable.
Dangote spoke through his Group Executive Director, Mr. Devakumar Edwin.
According to business mogul, his foray into the refining subsector of the oil industry is to reverse the trend just as it had successfully done in other sectors, including sugar and cement.
His clarification came even as the company’s Executive Director, Stakeholders Management and Corporate Communications, Mr. Mansur Ahmed, said in South Africa that the refinery would run full swing by 2017.
Edwin, while receiving on behalf of Dangote a group of oil and gas stakeholders in Lagos, said the capacity of the petrochemical plant, being developed alongside the refinery, had been increased from 750,000 to 3.6 million tonnes.
He said, “The entire petrochemical industry is history. Nobody has started with a 3.6-million-tonne 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 tonnes and is a huge petrochemical complex.”
Edwin said the consumption of petrochemical products in Nigeria and the sub-Saharan Africa was quite limited but noted that there would be growth in the future. “If the cement industry had not developed like this today; if we were still living with a 3.4-million-tonne per annum capacity; today, we would have imported about 16 million tonnes of cement and you can imagine if we had imported this, it would have cost the country $2bn of foreign exchange,” he explained.
Edwin dismissed fears that any change in government policy could affect the business.
He said, “We have witnessed so many political upheavals but never had any negative impact on our business as such because our business is not dependent on any government contracts or any linkage to the government.
“Fortunately, for the business we are in and the way we carry out risk analysis, we go through a rigorous analysis. One of the reasons why we carry out this rigorous risk analysis is because most of the investments come from the President’s pocket and he makes massive investment. Obviously, he will not want his investments to be wiped out because of one mistake.”
– Agency reports
