By Our Reporter

Nigeria’s Dangote Oil Refinery was not designed to meet local base oils challenges, stakeholders in the Nigerian lubricant market told B&L. “Well, any economic development that will affect the general well-being of Nigerians will likely improve the uptake of lubricants,” Taiye Williams, managing director of Lubcon International, told B &L. “I would have wished for Dangote Refinery to have included the production of base oil; sadly, it is not part of the product slate.”

For his part, Emmanuel Ekpenyong, regional aviation technical manager at Puma Energy, said that Dangote’s refinery will not solve the myriad of challenges confronting the local base oils market in Nigeria. He explained that Dangote’s feedstock, which is largely sweet crude, is not suited to producing a good yield of base oils. “Remember that Dangote’s feedstock will largely be Nigerian crude, which is sweet crude,” Ekpenyong said. “Sweet crude does not give a good yield of base oils, which form about 70–99% of all finished lubricants. Nigerian blenders will still have to import base oils, which is the single largest challenge blenders face.”

Similarly, Dike Chijioke, Lubricant and Fuels Sales Manager, HOGL Energy Limited, added that Dangote’s refinery would have been helpful if it would provide base oils from refined crude needed for the local market and eliminate the huge trouble of sourcing foreign exchange (forex) to import the same materials. He, however, noted that the new refinery will not make much of a success in this regard because “other blends of base stocks will need to be imported because we only have sweet crude, which may not form good-quality base oils.”.

Dangote Oil Refinery, a 650000 barrels per day (PBD) refinery, is Africa’s biggest oil refinery and the world’s biggest single-train facility. On its website, it claims that it will “have the capacity to meet 100% of the Nigerian requirement of all refined products and also have a surplus of each of these products for export”. However, it does not seem as if base oils is part of its product offerings. The refinery started supplying petroleum products such as diesel and jet fuel to the local market on April 2.