Dangote Group plans to double its production of urea from the current three million tonnes in the next two years.
The President of the Group, Alhaji Aliko Dangote stated this during an interview with Bloomberg Tv where he said the company will not actively pursue upstream assets in the oil industry.
Urea is material used as fertiliser and also in the production of plastics and drugs. It also forms an important raw material for the chemical industry.
In 2023, Nigeria exported over 3 million kilo grams of urea worth over $1 billion mainly to Brazil, the United States, Italy, South Africa and others.
The business mogul also noted that the company will be increasing its production of other chemical materials such as polypropylene, polyethylene, lab benzene and others.
He said, “In oil, you can produce up to 6,800 items. We are going to double our size in polypropylene, we are going to also do about five hundred thousand tonnes of polyethylene and then we are also doing on the other side a different company which is owned by us, we are doing about three million tonnes of urea and we’ll also double that.”
“There is lab benzene which is the raw material for making detergent and nobody produces that in Africa. So, these are the smaller projects we want to do and we want to try and achieve that in the next two and half years.”
He also noted that the company will not be actively investing in oil production although his two oil wells will begin production by October.
However, he noted that if the opportunity to purchase some upstream asset presents itself, the Dangote Group will consider it but at present no concrete plans.
On the pricing of petrol from the Dangote refinery, he noted that imported petrol is 20% more expensive to Nigeria than that from the Dangote refinery and the decision of subsidy is the federal governments to make.
He said, “NNPC bought petrol from us in September at the international price and they also imported about 800 tonnes of gasoline. The one that they bought from us is cheaper than the one they are importing. But the one they imported is maybe around 15% to 20% than ours.”
“What they are supposed to do is to sell at a basket price of if they want to remove subsidy, they can announce that they have removed subsidy which is okay.”
Speaking further, he stated that the company will put trackers on its petrol trucks to determine the exact consumption of petrol in Nigeria as there is no reliable figure for now.