African Richest Man, Aliko Dangote, Building Oil Refinery

Nigeria is Africa’s top oil producer, yet it’s in the middle of a fuel crisis.

The missing link: oil refineries. To address this massive disconnect, Billionaire businessman Aliko Dangote is building an oil refinery right outside Lagos.

Dangote, who has made most of his money through his African cement business , is building a 650, 000 barrel- per - day oil refinery and petrochemical plant in the commercial capital , Lagos , scheduled for completion by early 2018. The facility , with capacity to produce 55 . 2 million liters of gasoline daily , will produce other fuels as well as fertilizer and polymers , according to Devakumar Edwin, chief executive officer of the Dangote Group .

“ It ’ s a very large refinery. We can produce the entire gasoline requirements of the country , ” he said .
On completion , the refinery would be the fifth - biggest in the world after plants in Venezuela , South Korea and India , according to data compiled by Bloomberg . It would also be the world ’ s largest single - train refinery, Dangote told reporters at the construction site on Jan. 10 .

“ From Nigeria all the way down the coast to Senegal and all the countries in between , there ’ s almost no functional refinery except the one in Ivory Coast, ” said Dolapo Oni, the Lagos- based head of energy research at Ecobank Transnational Inc . “ Dangote is going to be able
to plug that market . ”