By the time Dangote Petroleum Refinery, the largest in Africa, is done with its upgrade project, the facility located within the Lekki Free Trade Zone, Lagos, would have the capacity to move from a daily 650,000 barrels per day refining volume to 700,000 barrels per day.
By the last quarter of the year, Dangote Refinery assured that it would have accomplished the 50,000 barrels per day additional capacity.
This was announced by Aliko Dangote, president of the Dangote Group, in Lagos recently during a chat with visitors and newsmen.
Dangote said the largest single-train refinery could not reach 100 percent capacity this year due to the modifications going on, expressing confidence that the modifications would scale up the oil refinery.
According to Dangote, the Residue Fluid Catalytic Cracking unit is operating at 85 percent of its capacity as of July 2025. RFCC is a chemical process used in petroleum refineries to convert heavy residue feedstocks into more valuable, lighter products such as gasoline, liquefied petroleum gas, and diesel.
“Our RFCC is at 85 per cent. We are not up to 100 percent because there are some modifications that we are doing. It will be completed by the end of the year, and we believe we will reach 700,000 bpd, not even 650,000, because all the other components and departments have reached 100 percent. Some are even doing up to 145 per cent. So, we’ve done very well in that area,” Dangote said
He disclosed that the refinery bought 19 million barrels of crude from the United States between June and July this year. Dangote noted that the United States supplies about 55 percent of its crude needs, having bought 10 million barrels in early July.
“As a company, we bought 10 million barrels of crude this month. So, 10 million barrels this month means that at the capacity we are, it’s about 55 per cent coming from the US,” he said.
The billionaire businessman recalled how he decided to build the $20bn refinery to make Nigeria and Africa self-sufficient in energy security. He said he decided to build a refinery after his desire to buy the government-owned refineries was aborted by the late former President Umar Yar’adua in 2007.
According to him, building a refinery is not similar to building a house, saying he would not have started the project if he had known the difficulties involved. However, he expressed confidence that the completion of the facility has shown that nothing is impossible.
“People believe building a refinery is like building a house, but, like what I keep saying, if I knew what we were going to face, I wouldn’t have started it at all. So, the luck that we’ve had now as a group was because we didn’t know what we were getting into, really, and we believe that nothing is impossible,” he said.
Dangote noted that as the project got deeper, the group was faced with whether to stop and sink or continue and succeed. “So, we have to push and continue to make sure that we deliver,” he said.
