The Dangote Group has dismissed suggestions that the huge oil refinery being built in Lekki, Lagos Nigeria, will not be ready in 2020 as planned.
Executive Director Devakumar Edwin, who oversees the project, described the suggestion that the refinery is unlikely to start production until 2022 as the product of “someone’s wild imagination”.
“Ninety-five percent of engineering has been completed, 90 percent of procurement has been completed.”
“We started civil works in July last year and we have scheduled 2-1/2 years for mechanical completion,” he said, referring to the point where a plant is ready to be handed over for commissioning. Aliko Dangote himself had said he hoped to finish building the refinery, which will cost between $12-14 billion USD in 2019 and to start production in early 2020.
The reaction by Edwin came in the wake of a report published by Reuters quoting some unidentified sources, who claimed the unlikelihood of petrol and diesel being produced from the plant until 2022, thus missing the target date by two years.
Even by 2022, the faceless sources claimed, many units at the refinery and accompanying petrochemical plant would not be complete. The 650,000 barrel per day (bpd) refinery near Lagos, is Africa’s biggest, and is expected to turn Nigeria from an importer of refined products into an exporter, transforming global trade patterns.
