After waiting in line for more than four hours to buy gasoline in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, taxi driver Adebayo Olawole considered himself fortunate he got a half-filled tank.
Gasoline shortages are common in Africa’s largest oil producer, which imports the majority of its refined fuel, straining the nation’s finances and currency. Decades of poor maintenance, corruption and mismanagement have left Nigeria’s four state-owned refineries working at a fraction of their capacity.
Dangote, who has made most of his money through his African cement business, is building a 650,000 barrel-per-day oil refinery and petrochemical plant in Lagos, scheduled for completion by early 2018. The facility, with capacity to produce 55.2 million liters of gasoline daily, will produce other fuels as well as fertilizer and polymers, according to Devakumar Edwin, CEO of the Dangote Group.
“It’s a very large refinery. We can produce the entire gasoline requirements of the country,” he said.
On completion the refinery would be the fifth-biggest in the world after plants in Venezuela, South Korea and India, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. It would also be the world’s largest single-train refinery, Dangote told reporters at the construction site on Jan10.
