Africa’s Largest Oil Refiner Set for Public Listing

Nigeria’s Dangote Group plans to list its company Dangote Petroleum Refinery & Petrochemicals, which runs Africa’s largest refinery, on the Nigerian stock exchange in early 2025, the group’s president Aliko Dangote said this weekend.  

The group also plans to list another multi-billion-dollar subsidiary, Dangote Fertiliser Limited, on the domestic stock market in the first quarter of next year, Dangote, who is Africa’s richest person, told Nigerian media. 

“Our export strategy aims to alleviate foreign exchange pressures on the economy,” Dangote said, adding that “We hope to list the refinery and fertiliser on the NGX by the first quarter of 2025.”

The Dangote refinery in Nigeria, Africa’s biggest and newest crude processing facility, has been recently raising imports of U.S. oil crude oil, in a sign that American barrels are currently available at competitive prices overseas.

So far in 2024, the Dangote refinery, which opened for operations earlier this year, has already bought more than 16 million barrels of West Texas Intermediate crude, according to data compiled by Bloomberg last week. 

The refinery is primarily using Nigerian crude, but the share of U.S. crude is set to further rise in August and September, as Dangote has put out tenders for more U.S. crude supply, per data from tenders seen by Bloomberg. 

The refinery began the production of fuels in January 2024, marking the start-up of the plant that has seen years of delays.    

The facility, which has a processing capacity of 650,000 barrels per day (bpd), will meet 100% of Nigeria’s demand for all refined petroleum products and will also have a surplus of each of the products for export.

The Dangote refinery expects to export diesel to customers in Europe, as well as gasoline to Latin American and African markets. However, production of Euro V gasoline, the gasoline complying with Europe’s emissions standards, is not expected to be produced until late 2024, according to analysts at Facts Global Energy.   

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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