Strong indications emerge that President Muhammadu Buhari would on May 22nd officially inaugurate the long awaited Dangote Refinery.
The Special Assistant to the President on Digital Communications, Basir Ahmad said, “the Efforts by the federal government to make the country 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 as the 650,000 barrels per day Dangote Refinery, the world’s largest single-train refinery, is set for inauguration on May 22 by President Muhammadu Buhari”.
As controversies regarding the removal of fuel subsidy raged in the country, Nigerians had been wondering what had become the fate of the Dangote refinery which was expected to have come on stream since 2019.
But feelers reaching us confirmed that the refinery has since been completed and had been undergoing pre-inauguration testing.
The Dangote Refinery complex, which is located in the Lekki Free Zone area of Lagos, covers a land area of approximately 2,635 hectares, which is larger than the size of Victoria Island in Lagos.
It is set to complement the $2.5billion Dangote fertilizer plant which came on stream since 2022.
According to Industry Experts, single-train refinery uses an integrated distillation unit or one Crude Distillation Unit (CDU) to refine crude oil into various petroleum products, as against the use of multiple distillation units by most big refineries.
Due to the large capacity of the refinery, its pipeline infrastructure is the largest anywhere in the world, with 1,100 kilometres to handle three billion Standard Cubic Feet per day (Scf/d) of gas.
Report by the company states that the refinery has a 435MW-capacity power plant that is able to meet the total power requirement of Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company (IBEDC).
On completion, the refinery is expected to meet 100 per cent of the Nigerian requirement of all refined products and also have a surplus of each of these products for export.
The refinery is designed to process Nigerian crude and can also process other crudes. It is a multi-billion dollar project that will create a market for $21 billion per annum of Nigerian crude oil.
It would be recalled that the Federal Government which had hinted of exiting fuel subsidy regime by June this year, had made a U-turn recently, insisting that it had suspended the idea to give suffering Nigerians and the incoming administration of Bola Ahmed Tinubu a soft landing, especially to settle down to the business of governance.