President of the Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote, has hinted of a planned expansion of the Dangote oil refinery from the 650,000 capacity to 1.4 million barrels per day.
If this happens, the refinery will become the largest in the world.
Dangote said this in an interview with S&P Global, where he also mentioned that the expansion plan would be carried out with Middle Eastern funding,
Dangote was said to have described his ambitions to develop African energy independence as a “herculean task.”
“We have to build the refinery again, either here or somewhere else. But really, somewhere else is not possible because we’d have to go and spend so much building infrastructure, and we have the infrastructure already here,” Dangote was quoted as saying.
In Nigeria, S&P Global Commodity Insights projected that net gasoline imports could more than double from 2026-27 to hit almost 200,000 bpd by 2030, underpinned by economic development and rapid population growth.
“In July, Dangote unveiled plans to expand the refinery from its current 650,000 bpd to 700,000 bpd by the end of the year.
“Now, the target is to reach 1.4 mbpd, with no specified date, a scale that would surpass the world’s largest 1.36 mbpd refinery in Jamnagar, India,” the report said.
Engineers working at the Lekki complex had said it was designed with room for growth, pointing out empty concrete plots capable of holding a second refining system.
Expanding could involve building a second refinery with the same configuration, one engineer said, potentially with the addition of a vacuum distillation unit to boost light ends yields.
Dangote said the company is also working on potential linear alkylbenzene and base oil projects and aims to grow its annual polypropylene capacity from one million metric tonnes to 1.5 million mt in the next few years.
Though the International Energy Agency said the world will already have 11.4 mbpd more refining capacity than it needs by 2030, concentrated mostly in China and India.
However, Dangote was said to have rejected a model that leaves Africa dependent on imported fuel and remains determined to disrupt a market shaped by economies of scale. He warned that the continent will be in trouble without huge private investment.
“Most African governments will not have the capacity to build a refinery,” Dangote said, calling smaller projects like Angola’s new Cabinda facility “a drop in the ocean.”
Platts said the company’s own maturing debt was recently seen as a key funding hurdle before it secured a critical $4bn financing agreement in August.
To expand the refinery and develop a new petrochemicals project in China, Dangote is actively considering a strategic partnership with Middle Eastern companies.
“Our business concept is going to change. Now instead of being 100 per cent Dangote-owned, we’ll have other partners,” he said in the interview.
Within the next year, he noted that the refining business will list 5 – 10 per cent of its shares on the Nigerian stock exchange.
“We don’t want to keep more than 65-70 per cent,” Dangote said, explaining that shares will be offered incrementally subject to investor appetite and market depth.
He added that the door remains open for the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC)Limited to boost its stake after it trimmed its interest to 7.2 per cent, but not before its next phase of growth is well underway.
“I want to demonstrate what this refinery can do, then we can sit down and talk,” Dangote said.
