Victoria Benedict
President Muhammadu Buhari would on May 22nd officially inaugurate the long-awaited Dangote Refinery.
Special Assistant to the President on Digital Communications, Basir Ahmad, revealed the information in a Twitter message on Sunday, saying: “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”.
With controversies surrounding the removal of fuel subsidies in the country, Nigerians had been wondering what had become the fate of the Dangote refinery, which was expected to have come on stream in 2019.
But information reaching newsmen also confirmed that the refinery has since been completed and had been undergoing pre-inauguration testing.
The refinery is set to complement the $2.5 billion Dangote fertilizer plant, which came on stream in 2022.
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.
The refinery is believed to be the biggest refinery in Africa and also the biggest single-train refinery in the world.
According to industry experts, a 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.
According to a report by the company, 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 has 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.
Although the Buhari administration would wind down on May 29, the government had prided itself on giving all the necessary support to make the refinery come onstream.
Recall that the Federal Government, which had hinted at 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.
Tinubu is billed to be inaugurated on May 29, 2023, to pilot the affairs of the country for a four-year tenure.
