The Dangote Petroleum Refinery is building eight more tanks in its bid to have enough storage for imported crude oil.
A report by Africa Report has it that the refinery is ramping up its storage capacity by 6.29 million barrels, equivalent to 1 billion litres.
According to The PUNCH, the report stated that the $20 billion refinery is planning to stockpile imported crude oil as local supplies become unreliable.
Officials of the refinery were quoted as saying that low crude supply from the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited “is driving import dependence.”
The building of eight additional tanks will see crude storage capacity at the $20bn refinery jump by 41.67 per cent to 3.4 billion litres.
“Importing crude from other countries instead of buying locally means that our crude stockpiles will have to be higher,” the Vice President in charge of oil and gas business at Dangote Industries, Devakumar Edwin, was quoted as having said.
“So we have started building eight additional crude tanks to hold a billion litres, over and above our original storage capacity. Four of them are nearing completion,” Edwin added.
The refinery currently has 20 crude storage tanks with a capacity of 120 million litres each, totalling 2.4 billion litres.
Its refined product tanks have a total capacity of 2.34 billion litres.
Dangote began producing diesel and aviation fuel in January 2024, and petrol in September, with products supplied to the domestic market and exported to several countries.
Edwin described the supply of crude oil from the NNPC to the Dangote refinery as “still very low.”
Nigeria, which is Africa’s biggest oil producer, was importing its fuels until last year when the Dangote refinery came on stream.
Today, the NNPC’s Warri and Port Harcourt refineries have resumed operations, indicating that the company would have to.
