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Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest person, said his refinery has secured a license to refine more than 300,000 barrels of Nigerian crude per day and will begin to process gasoline “soon.”
“We don’t want to start our refinery with foreign goods, we want to start with the Nigerian crude,” the billionaire said in an interview with Bloomberg on Saturday in Riyadh on the sidelines of the Saudi-Nigeria business roundtable.
The refinery, funded by Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, will transform oil trading in the Atlantic Basin and remove a lucrative outlet for fuels produced in Europe and the United States that have for years powered the cars, trucks and generators on the continent.
The refinery is in the Lekki free trade zone near Lagos. Once it is fully up and running, it will turn oil powerhouse Nigeria into a net exporter of fuels, a long-sought goal for the OPEC member that is currently almost totally reliant on imports.
The initial production capacity at the refinery will be a 27.2 million tonnes a year, or 74,538 tonnes per day, of which diesel output will be equivalent to 15,197 tonnes per day (5.54 million tonnes a year), once production ramps up, according to internal data about the refinery seen by MoneyCentral.
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