Aliko Dangote says his focus in the oil and gas industry is in the downstream sector over the upstream, despite having two oil blocks.
In an interview on Monday, the billionaire businessman told Bloomberg TV that he plans to commence production in the blocks in October but maintained that his priority was in the downstream sector.
With his $20 billion refinery now operational, Dangote is upbeat about the potential of generating 6,800 items from refining crude oil.
“Now we are doing polypropylene, we are going to double our size in polypropylene,” he said.
“We are also going to be doing about 500,000 tons of polyethylene.
“On the other side, in a different company which is also under us, we are doing about three million tons of Urea.
“Also, there is lab benzene which is a raw material for making detergent and nobody produces that in Africa.”
“So, these are the smaller projects which we want to do and we want to try and achieve these in the next two and a half years,” he added.
Dangote said he plans to save money on oil extraction (upstream) due to his existing oil blocks and may consider purchasing cheap assets (oil blocks) if available.
“I don’t want to put too much money there,” he said of his upstream plans.
The businessman, who did not reveal much about his reported feud with Nigeria’s state oil company, the NNPC, disclosed that his refinery will reveal the real amount of petrol consumed in Nigeria.
“Right now, nobody can tell you what we are consuming. It's all guess work,” he said.
“By us producing, everything can be accounted for,” Dangote said assuringly.
“Most of the trucks or ships that will come and load from us, we will actually put a tracker on them to be sure they are going to take the oil within Nigeria.
“And that I think can help the government save a lot of money.”
The NNPC started lifting petrol from the Dangote refinery on 15 September.
