Vitol, Trafigura Lead Consumers Lining Up for New Mega Refinery in Nigeria

Vitol Group, Trafigura Group and BP Plc are the dominant consumers of fuels from Nigeria’s large new Dangote oil refinery close to Lagos that’s reshaping petroleum buying and selling in Africa and Europe.

The trio have accounted for the overwhelming majority of the plant’s shipments since flows started ratcheting up across the center of this 12 months, based on information from Exact Intelligence, a brand new oil-and-gas buying and selling analytics agency primarily based in Geneva. 

As soon as it’s totally up and working, Dangote ought to be capable of course of about 650,000 barrels a day of crude into merchandise together with gasoline and diesel. That can far exceed the fuelmaking capability of any single plant in Europe or Africa, serving to to reshape the areas’ oil and gasoline buying and selling. The emergence of Dangote has already trimmed a glut of Nigerian crude.

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Since beginning up, the refinery has loaded nearly 6 million tons of gasoline, Exact’s information present. That’s equal to nearly 45 million barrels. Loading charges averaged about 35,000 tons a day in October, its information present.

Dangote itself mentioned late final month that the refinery had reached processing charges of about 420,000 barrels a day of crude. The plant can be promoting into the Nigerian market. 

Vitol and Trafigura declined to remark. Dangote and BP didn’t reply to requests to remark.

The composition of gasoline cargoes loading from Dangote is carefully watched as a result of it provides clues into the place the refinery is at when it comes to beginning up totally different processing models. 

Exact’s figures present that automotive gasoil — diesel — is the most important cargo kind being lifted, adopted by gasoline oil. Collectively, they account for greater than 60 p.c of what’s being collected from the plant. Different fuels embrace gasoline and jet gasoline.