Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari will commission Dangote's multibillion-dollar oil refinery in two weeks, a presidential spokesman said Sunday, setting up the plant for its first production since construction began in 2016.
Nigeria, Africa's largest oil producer, sees the 650,000-barrel-per-day refinery, built by billionaire industrialist Aliko Dangote's Dangote Group, as a solution to ending the country's dependence on imports for almost all of its refined oil products.
Spokesman Bashir Ahmad said Buhari will commission the refinery, near Lagos, on May 22, a week before he leaves office after serving the maximum two terms allowed by the constitution.
A Dangote spokesperson confirmed the timing of the commissioning but did not provide details.
The cost of Dangote's refinery has risen to $19 billion from the original estimate of between $12 billion and $14 billion, after years of delay.
The Dangote refinery complex is located in the Lekki Free Trade Zone in Lagos. The refinery is the largest in Africa and also the largest single-train refinery in the world.
A single train refinery uses an integrated distillation unit or crude distillation unit to refine crude oil into various petroleum products, as opposed to the use of multiple distillation units by most large refineries.