Dangote Industries Limited has acquired 4,000 additional construction machines as it moves ahead with plans to expand its Lekki refinery to a processing capacity of 1.4 million barrels of crude oil per day.

The new equipment has increased the company’s construction fleet to 6,500 machines, including 330 cranes, according to the Group Vice President, Oil and Gas and Fertiliser, Devakumar Edwin.

Edwin disclosed this during a briefing with journalists while they toured the refinery in Ibeju-Lekki, Lagos.

He explained that Dangote initially purchased 2,563 pieces of equipment after contractors, including Julius Berger, indicated that they did not have enough capacity to construct the refinery’s main factory buildings.

Rather than rely heavily on foreign contractors and incur additional costs associated with transporting their equipment into and out of Nigeria, the company decided to build its own equipment fleet.

According to Edwin, Julius Berger later worked on 43 of about 127 auxiliary buildings at the refinery, including facilities such as canteens, transformer rooms, control rooms and fire-fighting houses.

He said Nigeria’s infrastructure challenges also influenced Dangote’s decision to acquire its own construction machinery, noting that the company had faced a shortage of heavy construction equipment during the development of earlier projects.

For the Lekki refinery, Dangote hired one of only two 5,000-tonne cranes available globally and also purchased hundreds of cranes for its own operations.

Edwin said infrastructure already developed for the first phase of the refinery would be reused during the expansion, helping the company reduce both construction costs and the time required to complete the project.

The refinery was originally designed to process 650,000 barrels of crude oil daily but is currently operating at about 700,000 barrels per day, according to Edwin.

He also said Dangote chose to execute the expansion through its own project company after international contractors proposed fees of about 12.5 per cent of an estimated $19.5bn project cost.

That would have amounted to roughly $2.5bn in contractor fees, prompting the group to undertake the engineering and project management itself through Dangote Projects Limited.

Once the expansion is completed, Edwin said Dangote expects its total refining capacity to reach 2.1 million barrels per day, including the planned 700,000 barrels-per-day refinery in Kenya.