Fuel: Dangote Refinery to Expand Storage Capacity to 5.3bn Litres

The President of Dangote Group, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, says the company is expanding the storage capacity of the refinery by 600 million litres.

This, according to him, will enable the refinery to have a storage capacity of 5.3 billion litres.

The Dangote Petrochemical Refinery  currently has 4.78 billion litres of storage capacity for refined petroleum products.

Dangote spoke at the Afreximbank Annual Meetings and AfriCaribbean Trade & Investment Forum in Nassau, The Bahamas on Wednesday.

The billionaire alleged that international oil companies refused to sell crude oil to his refinery because they did not want him to succeed.

Asked to speak on whether or not his refinery would crash the pump price of petrol, which currently sells at around N700 per litre, Dangote gave no affirmative answer, but he quickly recounted how the price of diesel fell from 1,700 to N1,200 when diesel from his refinery flooded the market.

“The issue of gasoline is certainly a different issue. That one is being dealt with by the government. But let me give you an example. In the diesel, which the industries, transporters and everybody consume; when we first started, it was N1,700, and the dollar conversion was about N1,200 then. Immediately when we started, within two weeks we brought down the price to N1,000. We took it from N1,700 to N1,200 and from N1,200 to N1,700, we have given more than 60 percent drop in price.

“With the currency now back up to about N1,500 per dollar, the price is still below N1,200. That’s a big improvement, from N1,700 to N1,200. And the diesel is available, we are not living from hand to mouth anymore,” Dangote replied when asked about a possible petrol price cut.