By Ishaya Ibrahim
A raging fire has engulfed the Dangote Refinery just three days after the company accused International Oil Companies (IOCs) in Nigeria of frustrating its effort to access crude oil.
It is not clear what started the fire. But videos of the inferno seen on X shows it’s a massive fire that could cause severe damage to the operations of the company.
In the video, workers at the facility were seen in groups within sections of the facility not affected by the fire.
Early in June at an Afreximbank summit in the Bahamas, Dangote assured that his Refinery would, in the first week of July, saturate the Nigerian market with premium motor spirit.
Experts say the local supply from Dangote would lower the price of petrol from about N700 to N500. But with today’s fire, that plan may have been disrupted.
On Sunday June 23, Vice President, Oil and Gas at Dangote Industries Limited (DIL), Devakumar Edwin, had accused International Oil Companies (IOCs) in Nigeria of doing everything to frustrate the survival of Dangote Oil Refinery and Petrochemicals.
Edwin said the IOCs are deliberately and willfully frustrating the refinery’s efforts to buy local crude by jerking up high premium price above the market price, thereby forcing it to import crude from countries as far as the United States, with its attendant high costs.
According to him: “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. It would be recalled that the NUPRC, recently met with crude oil producers as well as refineries owners in Nigeria, in a bid to ensure full adherence to Domestic Crude Oil Supply Obligations (DCSO), as enunciated under section 109(2) of the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA). It seems that the IOCs’ 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.”