Mr Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest business mogul has promised to flood West Africa with gasoline in June 2024.
He said Nigeria will stop importation of petrol also when the Lekki-Lagos based refinery behins gasoline production in June.
Dangote spoke at the Africa CEO Forum Annual Summit in Kigali on Friday.
“Right now, Nigeria has no cause to import anything apart from gasoline and by sometime in June, within the next four or five weeks.
Nigeria shouldn’t import anything like gasoline; not one drop of litre,” he said.
Consequently, Dangote said the shortfall in the supply of petrol will be addressed not only in Nigeria but other West African countries.
“We have enough gasoline to give to at least the entire West Africa.
We have enough diesel to give to West Africa and Central Africa,” he said.
Dangote said there is enough aviation fuel to meet the continent’s demands, as well as export to Brazil and Mexico.
Speaking on the commencement of petrol production by the refiner, Dangote said “next month, we will be producing diesel and gasoline”.
He said the refinery would take most African crude grades.
Dangote said the refiner would not only focus on producing petroleum products.
“Today, our polypropylene and our polyethene will meet the entire demand of Africa and we are doing base oil, which is to do like engine oil,” he said.
“We are doing linear benzyl, which is raw material to produce LLB, which is raw material to produce detergent. We have 1.4 billion population and nobody is producing that in Africa.”
He said all the raw materials detergents are being imported into Africa, adding that the refinery is producing these raw materials to make Africa self-sufficient.
“As I said, give us three and a maximum of four years and Africa will not, I repeat, not import any more fertilizer from anywhere.
We will make Africa self-sufficient in potash, phosphate (even if we don’t have enough, there is a lot in Morocco. But we are also looking at the opportunities,” he said
“For our urea, we are at three million tonnes and in the next twenty months, we will be at six million tonnes of urea which is the entire capacity of Egypt.”
The business mogul said the refiner has 650,000 barrels per day, one million tonnes of polypropylene, 590,000 carbon black — the raw materials ink, dyes and others.
Dangote said the second phase of the refinery will start early next year.
The construction of the $20 billion refinery started in 2016.
It is currently producing diesel, aviation fuel, kerosene.
The urea and fertiliser component has also started production.