Faith Korode
Business mogul and richest man in Africa, Aliko Dangote made history recently for launching the biggest refinery in Africa and also the biggest single-train refinery in the world, Dangote Refinery.
The outgoing president, President Muhammadu Buhari commissioned Dangote Refinery and Petrochemicals with other notable dignitaries, head of states, business moguls and notable people across the world on Monday, 22nd of May, 2023.
The integrated refinery and petrochemical complex in the Lekki Free Zone near Lagos, Nigeria, will produce Euro-V quality gasoline and diesel, as well as jet fuel and polypropylene and will likely generate 4,000 direct and 145,000 indirect jobs.
It is expected to double Nigeria’s refining capacity and help in meeting the increasing demand for refined petroleum products, while providing cost and foreign exchange savings. It is estimated to have an annual refining capacity of 10.4 million tonnes of petrol.
Dangote is one of the few companies carrying out an Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) contract directly for a petroleum refinery and a petrochemical complex. Aside from three companies, no single owner has completed the entire EPC Contract for a petroleum refinery globally.
Many people would never know what Aliko Dangote went through to create his most recent initiative. According to Vanguard, the project which make see as simple involved significant enormous challenges.
Think about the following:
How do you proceed when your imported shipment for the refinery makes up almost 70% of the entire cargo at the ports in Lagos yet you are unable to remove them?
How do you transport instrument that weighs 3000 tons when the capacity of your ports is 200 to 250 tons?
Which route would you take to convey the equipment even if you were successful in bringing it in?
What happens when you require a 5000-ton capacity crane yet the largest crane in the nation only has a 650-ton capacity?
Even worse, there were only two such 5000-ton cranes in existence, and they were both in operation.
So what do you do in place of paying a crane $300,000 every day? Dangote purchased the cranes.
Since many of the goods, including the heaters and pipes, are over-dimensional, Dangote was forced to enter into a contract with a business to handle the transportation into its yard and pay more than $70 million only for that.
Dangote built 126 km of roads inside the factory itself. To provide protection, 54,000 storm columns have been erected.
We show the reasoning for Aliko Dangote’s decision to enter the oil industry by piecing together his statements, speeches, and famous interview with Francine Lacqua, an anchor on Bloomberg TV in London, in 2017.
A daily excess of about 38 million litres of petrol, diesel, kerosene and aviation fuel are delivered to Nigeria from the refinery. The refinery is designed to treat crude oil grades from the continents of Africa, Asia and America.
Aliko Dangote, the president of the Dangote Group, and Babajide Sanwo-Olu, the governor of Lagos State, welcomed Buhari.
The President of Dangote, Aliko Dangote says the main result of the Dangote petroleum refinery and Petrochemicals “will be in the market before the end of July or start of August this year”.
Guardians News reports that the Chief of Dangote Ventures expressed this while giving the welcome address at the initiation of the 650,000 bpd processing plant in Lagos State on Monday.
“Past the present function, our most memorable objective is to increase creation of the different items to guarantee that inside this year, we’re ready to completely fulfill our country’s interest for better products,” he said.
The achievement is to empower Nigeria to kill what he depicted as the awfulness of import reliance and stop — “unequivocally” — harmful, unacceptable oil based goods from being unloaded in Nigeria’s market.
“Past this, we mean to guarantee that our plants are run at the most noteworthy limit of use and the most noteworthy productivity to empower us to send out to different business sectors, particularly in the ECOWAS and more extensive districts where 53 nations out of 55 are subject to imports to satisfy their oil based commodities need,” he added.
His financial specialist said the undertaking was the acknowledgment of a “unmistakable open door” for Nigeria, refering to the African Association’s obligation to the production of an African common market through the African continental free trade area (AfCFTA).
