Dangote refinery expansion at Lekki will use 4,000 extra machines, taking the group’s construction fleet to 6,500, officials said on Friday

On Friday, 18 September 2026, Dangote Industries Limited Group Vice President for Oil and Gas and Fertiliser Devakumar Edwin told editors on a tour of the Lekki plant in Ibeju-Lekki, Lagos, that the company had bought 4,000 more construction machines for the Dangote refinery expansion to 1.4 million barrels per day.

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Devakumar Edwin said the first buy was 2,563 machines after Julius Berger and other contractors said they could not build the main factory buildings.

The extra 4,000 take the fleet to 6,500, including 330 cranes. “We ended up buying 2,563 pieces of equipment. We became the second largest company in the world in terms of construction equipment. Today, we are the largest because of the expansion,” Devakumar Edwin said.

He said President of the Dangote Group Aliko Dangote chose to own the kit rather than hire foreign engineering, procurement and construction firms, which would have shipped gear in and out and loaded depreciation onto the bill. “So my president said, very well, let’s go and buy all the construction equipment.”

Julius Berger, after seeing the drawings, declined the main process buildings. “They said, sorry, we cannot do any of your factory buildings. We don’t have the capacity,” Devakumar Edwin said. The firm later built 43 of about 127 auxiliary buildings, including canteens, transformer rooms, control rooms and fire houses.

He said Nigeria’s thin plant-hire market forced the spend. When Dangote built the Apapa sugar refinery in 1998, the country had only two 150-tonne cranes.

For Lekki the group hired one of only two 5,000-tonne cranes in the world and bought 330 of its own. Existing kit to be reused on the expansion includes a 10 million-tonne granite quarry, 82 batching plants, 203 transit mixers, a private port, a welding-gas plant and housing for 50,000 workers.

The first train was designed for 650,000 barrels a day and is running at 700,000, Devakumar Edwin said. Foreign contractors had quoted fees of about 12.5 per cent on an estimated $19.5 billion capital cost, or about $2.5 billion. “I said, it’s madness to go and give two and a half billion dollars to a contractor as just a fee for designing and supervising.” He said Aliko Dangote pointed to a desk plaque reading “Nothing is impossible,” after which Dangote Projects Limited handled detailed engineering, tenders and construction.

Devakumar Edwin said Lekki remains the world’s largest single-train refinery, ahead of a previous 430,000-barrel plant.

Design output is 44 per cent for Nigeria and 56 per cent for export, with 95 per cent as petrol, diesel or jet fuel.

The site is built for Euro 5 and Euro 6 product and for African grades plus West Texas Intermediate.

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He said group refining capacity would reach 2.1 million barrels a day after the Lekki expansion and a planned 700,000-barrel plant in Kenya.