Lagos, Nigeria – Dangote Refinery’s Chief Executive Officer David Bird says the plant is receiving only about five crude oil cargoes per month under the Federal Government’s Crude-for-Naira programme, far below the 13 to 15 cargoes it expects and needs to meet Nigeria’s domestic fuel demand.
Okay News reports that Bird, speaking in an interview with Arise Television, said the arrangement is widely misunderstood and stressed that it is not a subsidy or discount scheme, explaining that Dangote Refinery buys Nigerian crude at full international benchmark prices and pays all associated commercial costs, including freight, insurance and logistics, with the naira-for-crude mechanism simply removing the foreign exchange leg of the transaction.
He said that under the current agreement the refinery should be allocated around 13 to 15 cargoes each month, volumes he described as sufficient to cover Nigeria’s domestic fuel requirements, but that in practice it is getting only about five cargoes and often not the preferred crude grades its hardware is optimised to process, creating operational inefficiencies and reducing throughput.
Because of the shortfalls and grade mismatches, Bird disclosed that Dangote Refinery has been forced to source significant additional Nigerian crude on the international market, paying premiums of more than 18 dollars per barrel for those same grades, which he warned represents value leaking out of Nigeria to foreign traders rather than supporting the local refining and currency-stabilisation goals of the programme.
He noted that roughly 30 to 35 per cent of the refinery’s current crude diet comes via the Crude-for-Naira arrangement, with a further 30 to 40 per cent sourced internationally, underscoring the plant’s flexibility as a merchant refinery but also highlighting the importance of clearer, more consistent allocation methods if domestic refining is to expand sustainably.
Bird reiterated that the Crude-for-Naira policy was designed primarily as a currency stabilisation tool to lessen pressure on Nigeria’s foreign exchange reserves, not as a special concession for Dangote, and he urged the government to be more transparent about how it allocates crude so the programme can deliver its intended benefits for energy security and the wider economy.
