The heavy rains of this year have caused some serious damages to the ongoing Dangote refinery project worth over $4.5 billion.
The President, Dangote Industries Limited, Alhaji Aliko Dangote made the revelation in an interview with Bloomberg TV, saying the rain this year caused devastating damage on his refinery project site.
According to him, the oil refinery, designed to process 650,000 barrels a day of crude, should start producing fuel in the first quarter of 2020 and at full capacity within the six months of that.
He said: “We will finish the mechanical [part] by the end of 2019 if hopefully we don’t have the same rain because of the raining season this year… Climate change is real. We have had devastating damage to what we are doing at the site. But anyway, we have recovered a bit, and we are pushing.
“It is a huge refinery; it is the largest single line refinery in the world. We will start production by the end of the first quarter of 2020. We will ramp up very quickly; it is a high-tech refinery.”
It would be recalled that Dangote had said in August that he had arranged more than $4.5billion in debt financing for the refinery project.
According to him, lenders would commit about $3.15billion, with the World Bank’s private sector arm providing $150million.
He however said that he was investing more than 60 per cent from his own cash flow.
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