Dangote Refinery is now to begin producing petrol from August, making it the third time the company is postponing the date of petrol production.
It had earlier fixed June which was moved to July and now August.
Aliko Dangote, the President of the Dangote Group, disclosed this to journalists in Lagos on Sunday.
According to to him, the crude oil supply challenge which affected production of petrol from the refinery was resolved last week, following intervention by the NNPCL and the federal government.
Recently the Dangote Industries Limited (DIL) has been in the news for various reasons, from the alarm over attempts by international oil companies (IOCs) to frustrate efforts at purchasing crude for the refinery to fire incident at the refinery, among others.
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“While the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC)are trying their best to allocate the crude for us, the IOCs are deliberately and willfully frustrating our efforts to buy the local crude,” the Vice President, Oil and Gas at DIL, Devakumar Edwin,Ade the allegation in June.
“It seems that the objective is to ensure that our Petroleum Refinery fails. It is either they are deliberately asking for ridiculous/humongous premium or, they simply state that crude is not available.
“At some point, we paid $6 over and above the market price. This has forced us to reduce our output as well as import crude from countries as far as the US, increasing our cost of production.”
However, beyond resolving the crude supply issues and announcing plans to roll out petrol in August, Alhaji Dangote also said the refinery’s fertiliser unit would resume production in two weeks.
