The first crude feedstock for Nigeria’s flagship oil refinery, the 650,000 b/d Dangote refinery is heading to the plant and set to be received by the refinery on Thursday evening at 7pm local time.
According to an oil tanker tracking platform known as the S&P Global MINT tanker tracking platform, an OTIS tanker loaded a 950,000 barrel cargo of Nigeria’s Agbami crude on Dec. 6 and is currently flagged as en route to Lekki, which is the nearest land port to Dangote’s offshore crude receiving terminal.
The tanker, chartered by the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, is the first of initial crude supplies to the 650,000bpd capacity refinery. More shipments of crude oil both from within and outside Nigeria are expected to be arriving at the refinery gradually as the Dangote refinery starts to ramp up operations.
The Dangote refinery was officially commissioned in May by former President Muhammadu Buhari but has yet to commence commercial refining of crude oil due to a lack of domestic crude feedstock. However NNPC Ltd, which owns a 20% stake in the refinery, on November 5, 2023 revealed an agreement to supply 6 million barrels of crude oil as feedstock to the Dangote refinery in December.
This crude shipment from Agbami is in keeping with that commitment. Operated by Chevron, Agbami is one of Nigeria’s largest deepwater developments pumping about 100,000 b/d of crude oil. The Agbami deep-water platform produces light sweet crude which is known for yielding a large proportion of naphtha and kerosene.
It is understood that NNPC Ltd has further chartered a number of other tankers to transport additional crude shipments from Nigerian offshore fields to the refinery later this month.
The crude distillation unit of the Dangote refinery has been designed to process 12 crude grades at one time and has been engineered to process three Nigerian crude grades namely, the Escravos, Bonny Light and Forcados crude oil grades.
According to the Chief Operating Officer of Dangote refinery, once fully operational, the plant will produce 327,000 bpd of PMS, 244,000 bpd of diesel, 56,000 bpd of jet fuel/kerosene, as well as 290,000 mt/year of propane/LPG. However, the refinery would start operating at 370,000 b/d, producing mostly jet fuel and diesel
Nigeria, for the past two decades have been increasingly dependent on imported refined petroleum products. It is expected that the Dangote refinery once operational at full capacity will help end Nigeria’s almost total dependence on importation of petroleum products.
In addition to the Dangote refinery, the state-owned Port Harcourt refinery is undergoing a total overhaul and the Italian contractors handling the rehabilitation are in a race against time to complete the project before the end of the December deadline.
With the resumption of refining at the Port Harcourt refinery and the expected coming on stream of both the Warri and Kaduna refineries, Nigeria will likely become a net exporter of refined petroleum products by the end of 2024.