Af rica’s largest oil refinery – the 650 000-barrels-per-day (BPD) Dangote Refinery, built in the Lekki Free Zone near Lagos, Nigeria, is due to come on stream within the next year.In addition to being Africa’s biggest oil refinery, it is the world’s largest single-train facility.It was listed as one of the top 20 inf luential projects in 2020 by the global Project Management Institute (PMI). Describing the impact of the $14-billion project, which was launched in 2016, PMI vice president of global engagement, Otema Yirenkyi, said Nigeria currently exported raw materials and imported finished goods —a situation that left the state reliant on other countries and contributed to poverty. “The Dangote Refinery turns that model on its head, allowing Nigeria to not only produce oil, but the refined petroleum products that have always been in short supply. In the true sense of the word, theproject is “transformative,” he says.According to D.V.G. Edwin, group executive director, strategy, capital projects and portfolio development at Dangote Group, one of the biggest challenges was transporting the crude distillation column 17 700 kilometres from Sinopec in China to the site.The column weighs 2 250 metric tons, is 112.5 metres long, 14m wide and 14m high. Internal trays weighing around 536 tons also had to be transported.“There are very few shipping companies that can handle this kind of weight and length. The first vessel that we brought failed halfway through. It had to be towed to a nearby port and then we had to charter another vessel. “We transferred it and then, halfway through, that vessel failed, too. “So, two vessels failed before we could change to a third one and bring it back,” Edwin told PMI.The heavy lifting and transport contractor Mammoet built a new quay in the port of Lekki (the Dangote quay) to handle the project cargo.It included a 3 000-ton regenerator, which is the heaviest item to be transported over a public road in Africa.Mammoet also built a staging area at the site, using Enviromat as the base. According to the company, it used super heavy-lift ring cranes with a capacity of 5 000 tons. Their lifting capacity, combined with a long reach and a small footprint, enabled more efficient approaches to lifting and installing heavy and oversized components, it says.The biggest lifts include the 3 000-ton regenerator and a 2 000-ton crude column, which is the largest in the world.For the construction phase, Mammoet transported 239 items from the jetty to site, with a combined weight of 84 905 tons, and installed 154 items with a combined weight of 68 415 tons, according to CEO Paul van Gelder.At 1 100 kilometres, the pipeline infrastructure at the refinery is also billed as the longest in the world. It is designed to transport three billion standard cubic foot of gas per day. The refinery will meet all Nigerian requirements of all refined products and also have a surplus of each of these products for export. Once operational in 2022, it is designed to process $11 billion of Nigerian crude oil per year into various grades of petrol and diesel.It will also produce other petrochemical products such as polyethylene and polypropylene.The 112-metre-long crude distillation column is the world’s largest crude column. Here it is being delivered to site at the Dangote refinery in the Lekki Free Zone. Photo: MammoetThe weight of a regenerator — the heaviest item to be transported over a public road in Africa.“3000t
