Aliko Dangote is accelerating his push to reshape Africa’s energy landscape, unveiling plans to build a new oil refinery in Tanzania that will mirror the scale and capacity of his flagship facility in Lagos.
Dangote disclosed the plan on Thursday at the Africa Finance Corporation summit in Nairobi, where he shared the stage with William Ruto, the Kenyan president and Yoweri Museveni, the president of Uganda. The proposed refinery, to be sited in Tanga, is designed to process crude from across the region, including supplies from the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, positioning it as a strategic energy hub for East Africa.
“We are discussing that we are going to have a joint refinery in Tanga to benefit all of us,” Dangote said, committing to deliver the project within four to five years. He added that the facility would replicate the Nigerian refinery’s configuration, subject to regional government support.
The move signals a strategy by the Dangote Group to extend its refining footprint beyond West Africa, leveraging its existing mega-refinery in Lagos as a template for regional energy integration.
The Lagos-based Dangote Refinery, currently operating at full capacity of 650,000 barrels per day, has already begun to assert itself as a continental supply hub. Earlier this month, Dangote revealed that the facility exported about 17 cargoes of gasoline to African markets, while also increasing urea fertiliser shipments as global supply chains tighten amid geopolitical tensions.
“What I can do is assure Nigerians … and most of West Africa, Central Africa, and East Africa, we have the capacity to supply them,” Dangote said.
The refinery’s fertiliser arm, with an annual capacity of up to three million metric tonnes of urea, is also redirecting output toward African markets, reducing reliance on exports to the United States and South America.
Dangote’s expansion ambitions extend beyond Tanzania. The group is currently pursuing a major scale-up of its Lagos refinery, targeting an increase in capacity from 650,000 barrels per day to 1.4 million barrels per day—a move that could position it as the largest refinery globally.
To finance this expansion, the African Export-Import Bank has underwritten $2.5 billion as part of a $4 billion syndicated loan facility. In addition, the group signed a $400 million agreement earlier this year with XCMG Construction Machinery Co., Ltd. to accelerate construction and infrastructure development.
Beyond fuels, the expansion is expected to significantly boost petrochemical output, with polypropylene capacity projected to rise from 900,000 metric tonnes annually to 2.4 million tonnes.
