Africa’s richest person, Aliko Dangote has said that the Dangote Petroleum Refinery was constructed without any form of incentive from the federal government.
He made his statement at the 2024 Crude Oil Refinery-owners Association of Nigeria (CORAN) summit, held in Lagos on Tuesday.
“We built the Dangote refinery without a single incentive from the government,” he said.
Dangote, who was represented by Mansur Ahmed, the group executive director of Dangote Industries Ltd, added that Nigeria needs to stop mortgaging crude, to allow the country to save for the future.
“To ensure sufficient feedstock availability, we will need to stop mortgaging crude. It is unfortunate that while countries like Norway are putting oil proceeds into a future fund, in Africa we are spending oil proceeds from the future,” he said.
The business mogul also said Nigeria would also need to prioritise the implementation of the domestic crude supply obligations, stressing that the country would need to enlarge crude oil production capacity so as to support demand from new refining capacity.
“The government of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is taking active steps to achieve this through fast tracking IOC divestments and other initiatives,” he said.
On Nigeria becoming a net petroleum products exporter and an energy-sufficient country, Dangote said the country would need to construct a 1.5 million barrels per day of refining capacity.
“This will not be an easy feat and strong government support will be required to achieve this,” he said.
Speaking on how to achieve the vision of turning Nigeria into a refining hub, the Africa richest person said investors need to be incentivised.
He said despite producing over 3.4 million barrels of crude oil (bpd) per day, the African continent still imports about 3 million barrels of petroleum products daily.
Dangote noted that the imports, primarily from Europe, Russia, and other regions, are estimated to cost approximately $17 billion in 2023.
“However, these markets will be more competitively served from Nigeria. Both the crude oil and the petroleum products will travel shorter distances,” he said.
Dangote further said the logistics costs of a floating storage “would be eliminated, and countries can purchase their petroleum product requirements just in time”.
“Nigeria and Africa can become completely self-sufficient and we can keep all the value on our shores. We have done it in Cement, and we can certainly do it for petroleum products,” he said.
“It is worth noting that the Dangote refinery already produces sufficient diesel and jet fuel to meet Nigeria’s demand.”
He explained that the refinery recently commenced the production of petrol and would soon ramp up to meet Nigeria’s demand.
Dangote disclosed that the refinery’s refined products have been exported to diverse markets, including Europe, Brazil, the United Kingdom, the United States, Singapore, and South Korea, just to mention.