Dangote Group’s Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals FZE (DPRP) has let a contract to Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd. (BHEL), a state-owned enterprise of India, to supply and oversee installation of gas turbine generators at the operator’s 650,000-b/d integrated refining and petrochemicals complex in the Lekki Free Trade Zone near Lagos, Nigeria.
As part of the contract, BHEL will fabricate, deliver, and supervise on-site assembly and commissioning of eight gas turbine-generator packages at the refinery, the service provider said in late July.
BHEL said it will manufacture equipment due under the DPRP contract—its largest supply-and-supervision single order for gas turbine-generator packages ever—at its operations in Hyderabad, Telangana, and Bengaluru, Karnataka, both in southern India.
While neither BHEL nor DPRP revealed either a value of or specific timeframe associated with the contract award, the order likely comes as part of Dangote’s recently confirmed plans to expand refining and petrochemical production capacities of DPRP’s Lekki integrated complex by 2028.
Phased expansion
Following completion of a $2.5-billion private equity placement earlier this month to support the operator’s future growth plans, Dangote said its expansion of the Lekki complex would involve increasing the refinery’s crude oil processing capacity by an additional 750,000 b/d to 1.4 million b/d, which—if completed—would transform Lekki into the largest single-site refinery globally.
Alongside more than doubling the complex’s crude-processing capabilities, the proposed expansion also would entail lifting the site’s production of propylene by 750,000 tonnes/year (tpy), as well as adding 400,000 tpy of fresh production capacity for linear alkylbenzene.
Upon announcing the private-equity funding, Dangote said the expansion additionally would include growing the complex’s existing polypropylene production by 900,000 tpy to 2.4 million tpy while also equipping the site with new output of base oils.
Afreximbank, which helped arrange the private financing, said DPRP’s expansion program would occur in two phases to be executed between 2025-28 and 2028-30, respectively.
