The Chief Executive Officer of Dangote Refinery and Petrochemicals Company Limited, David Bird, has assured that the company can deliver a 1.4 million-barrel-a-day expansion of the plant within three years based on a replication strategy designed by the managementto avoid the cost overruns and delays that often plague large energy projects.
The industry expert, who spoke about the expansion plan targeted for 2026 on Wednesday, said the company’s management would leverage the “roofless replication” of the plant’s existing configuration, essentially copying the current design without reopening detailed engineering work to achieve the target.
According to him, this approach will allow the company to fast-track procurement and construction by relying on proven specifications rather than redesigning new systems.
He said: “Once you let engineers go back into an expansion, they often start to tinker, and that sends you back into months or years of detailed engineering. The idea here is replication. We will not need to reengineer, so we can get straight into ordering long-lead items and commencing construction.”
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Bird said the expansion timetable rested on two sets of parallel activities beginning immediately, starting with placing of orders for long-lead procurement items, such as major equipment and process units, with the goal of completing those purchases in the first month of 2026, with site preparation and early civil works are set to begin before the end of this month.
The CEO explained: “We’re doing two things in parallel. Procurement starts immediately, and at the same time we’re beginning filling works and site preparation.”
He said one of the key advantages of the project was that most of the groundwork had already been done and that the land earmarked for the expansion had been reclaimed, raised and prepared in advance, eliminating a major source of delay typical in large industrial projects.
Bird further clarified: “If you look at the landscape, you can see that the land has already been proclaimed and raised by more than a meter compared with where it was in the past. All of that pre-investment has been done. None of the normal site-preparation timelines really apply here.”
Due to that early preparation, he hinted that the refinery’s management expected to see structural steel coming out of the ground as early as the end of this year.
While acknowledging that large-scale refinery projects globally usually struggle to meet schedules and budgets, the company’s CEO said the combination of replication, early procurement and ready-to-build land would give Dangote Refinery a competitive advantage.
Bird assured: “We are firmly of the belief that we can bring this expansion online within three years.”
Industry experts believe if the target is achieved, the expansion projects will rank among the fastest large-scale refinery projects globally and underscoring Dangote Group owners’ ambition to position the refinery as one of the most competitive refining facilities globally
The Dangote Refinery is currently the largest single-train refinery in the world, with production capacity of 650,000 barrels a day.
