Switzerland based Sierra Leonean political economist and ex-ABU, Zaria academic, Dr Yusuf Bangura who has been in Nigeria in the past week took time off to visit the Dangote Refinery in Lagos. His short take might also interest Intervention readers outside his own mailing list. And so, here we go. The stuff came with videos illustrating defining structures such as mammoth crude oil tanks, the central control room and so on but not such pictures. There is thus a pictorial gap readers may have to fill imaginatively.
By Yusuf Bangura
We were given an official tour of the Dangote Refinery yesterday at Ibeju Lekki in Lagos. A very good friend facilitated the trip.
The company sent a driver and an escort to pick us up at our hotel at 8:00 and we arrived at the refinery at 09:35. The tour took about three hours.
It was really time well spent. We learned a great deal about the process of refining crude oil and its distribution as well as the wide range of activities that take place at the refinery complex.
We drove around the huge complex, which sits on 26.35 square kilometres of land—six times the size of Victoria Island. It was truly phenomenal! You have to see it to believe it. It is colossal in scope, intricately well designed, and, it seemed to us, driven by a highly committed technical work force.
One of the mammoth, game changing oil tanks!
With a capacity to refine 650,000 barrels per day, it is Africa’s biggest refinery and the world’s biggest single train facility. The refinery has a staggering 1,100 kilometre pipeline infrastructure, reckoned to be the largest in the world. We marvelled at the engineering of connecting the diverse network of pipelines to create a cohesive and functioning system.
Our guide, Ganiyu Adebayo, a recent engineering graduate and specialist on quality and safety, was very thorough in his explanations. He first took us to the base of the refinery complex—where the refinery connects with the ships that supply crude oil and receive the final products of gasoline, jet fuel, diesel and kerosene.
The refinery has a floating buoy that is located 20 kilometres offshore and serves as a point for tankers to offload crude and load final products. One huge crude oil pipe and four refined fuel pipes, buried 30-40 metres deep on the ocean floor, connect the ships with the refinery.
We visited the laboratory; the crude oil storage tanks; various sections of the refinery that process gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and kerosene; a huge and complex structure that extracts propylene from crude oil waste; a state of the art laboratory; the section of the refinery that processes propylene; the refinery’s power plant that can generate more than 400 megawatts of electricity; the fertiliser plant; the gantry where tankers load gasoline, diesel and kerosene; and the jetty, which serves as a port for exporting the fertiliser and importing the refinery’s machines.
One of the most unmistakable sights at the refinery is the large number of crude oil and fuel tanks. These are the lifeblood of the refinery. There are said to be 177 tanks of various sizes storing 4.7 billion litres of crude, intermediate and refined products. The biggest of these are the 16 crude oil tanks, each of which contains 120 million litres of crude. The crude oil tanks looked like football stadiums.
The gantry has 40 loading points for gasoline and can handle 40 tankers simultaneously. It supplies refined products to 2,650 tankers every day. We saw a large number of tankers parked outside the refinery waiting to go to the loading points.
We spent quite some time at the laboratory, which has a workforce of 70, most of whom are chemists or chemical engineers. We were highly impressed by the range of machines we inspected in different sections of the immaculate building. The guides were mostly young Nigerians who were very eager to explain the various functions of the machines. We were left in no doubt that the refinery takes quality control very seriously. We were shown a few machines, which, we were told, were not only world-class but cannot be found in other refineries in Africa. The staff seemed very proud of their work.
Superintendent of game changing investment
Another impressive place we visited was the central control room, which monitors everything that goes on in the refinery. It is housed in a sleek and immaculate building with many super screens and computers. We saw lots of young, enthusiastic people monitoring the activities at the refinery complex. Ganiyu showed us a few other smaller control rooms, which serve specific areas of the refinery. Quality, safety and security seem to be taken very seriously at the refinery.
Even though Ganiyu and a police escort were with us, we had to go through rigorous security checks every time we tried to enter a different section of the refinery. Some times we had to wait for the security officials to make a call and confirm that we were actually Dangote’s guests. Even Ganiyu and the escort were checked.
A game changer?
We were in awe of the massive investments of USD20 billion that Dangote has poured into the refinery. The tour reinforced our belief that the refinery holds one of the keys to unlocking Nigeria’s full developmental potential. At full capacity, the refinery will meet all of Nigeria’s needs of refined products and end the country’s scandalous dependence on imports. The company reckons that it can create a market for USD21 billion of Nigerian crude annually. It is currently refining 420,000 barrels of crude a day—230,000 barrels a day short of its full potential.
Sourcing crude oil for the refinery has been a big challenge. There are interests in the Nigerian oil industry that seem comfortable with the previous arrangements in which the country spends huge amounts of scare dollars to import refined products.
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, which has a mini stake in the refinery, is unable or unwilling to fully meet the refinery’s crude oil needs. Crude has been bought from the U.S. and Brazil and there are plans to secure further supplies from Angola and Libya.
One would have thought that as Africa’s most important country, population-wise, Nigerian governments would craft an effective industrial policy and resolutely rally behind such a project to enable the country to realise its long term dream of industrial transformation.
One hopes that the Dangote Refinery would be able to overcome the various interests that seek to stifle its growth and put Nigeria and the subregion on the path of industrial development.
