(Quick News Africa)- A range of industrial projects being undertaken by the Dangote Group worth $18 billion will save the Nigerian economy about $5.5 billion when completed in the year 2019, the company said Monday in a statement.
“We will be adding value to our economy as all these projects will be creating about 4,000 direct and 145,000 indirect jobs,” the statement, which was circulated by the African Press Organization, quoted Aliko Dangote, founder and owner of the company, as saying.
“We will also save over $7.5 billion for Nigeria annually, through import substitution and generate an additional $5.5 billion per annum through exports of the refined petroleum products, fertilizer and petrochemicals. We envisage that these projects, which would cost over $18billion, would be completed in 2019,” Dangote further noted.
The company is building the world’s largest single line refinery, a petrochemical complex, and the world’s second largest urea fertilizer plant.
The refinery, according to him, will have the capacity to refine 650,000 barrels of crude oil per day, while the petrochemical plant will produce 780 KTPA of polypropylene and 500 KTPA of polyethylene.
The fertilizer project is also expected to produce 3.0 million metric tons per annum (mmtpa) of urea.
In addition, Dangote is building the largest sub-sea pipeline infrastructure in any country in the world, with a length of 1,100 km to handle 3 billion SCF of gas per day.
The company also plans to construct a 570 megawatt power plant in its factory complex.
Also, gas from its gas pipeline will augment Nigeria’s natural domestic gas supply, with an estimated 12,000 megawatts of power generation to be added to the grid.
Ibe Kachikwu, minister of state for petroleum resources, who visited the oil refinery site at Lekki Free Trade Zone in Lagos, said the federal government relies heavily on the Dangote oil refinery in Lagos to fulfill its promise to Nigerians to end fuel importation by December 2019.
Kachikwu assured that the government remains ready to play its part as a responsible government to assist in making sure that the project is completed before the scheduled date.
The minister, who said he was overwhelmed by the dimension of the project, explained that the present government had always believed that the private sector holds the ace in industrialization efforts of the government.
He noted further that the government’s belief has been reinforced by what Dangote Group is doing.
