Africa’s Largest Refinery Could Soon Be Allowed to Set Its Own Gasoline Prices

Nigeria could soon let its new refinery, Africa’s biggest crude processing facility, set the price of gasoline it sells to marketers in a major shift of policy control over fuel prices, officials familiar with the plans told Bloomberg on Thursday.

As of next month, the Dangote refinery – which has yet to produce gasoline – could begin setting the price of the fuel it is selling to marketers, according to Bloomberg’s anonymous sources.

Nigeria has so far imported all the gasoline it consumes. The government has been subsidizing the price of the fuel, at a huge budget expense.

The Dangote refinery is set to begin production of gasoline soon, potentially upending global gasoline flows.

The newly operational refinery is poised to turn OPEC’s largest African crude oil producer from a gasoline importer to a gasoline exporter, impacting fuel market balances, especially in Europe.

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

The facility has yet to begin production of gasoline, but it is on the brink of producing large volumes of the fuel, sources familiar with the operations told Bloomberg on Monday.

The refinery, 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.

It is expected that once the refinery is fully operational at some point in 2025, more than half of its processing capacity will be earmarked for gasoline production.

In the middle of June, Dangote group’s president Aliko Dangote said that the refinery was delaying the start of gasoline deliveries after the middle of July.

Back then, Dangote, Africa’s richest man, said that the refinery would be able to take gasoline to the market by the third week of July.

This timeline has slipped, and most industry analysts expect considerable volumes of gasoline out of Nigeria to hit international markets next year.