DuPont bags Dangote refinery contract

US chemical giant DuPont said on Thursday that Nigeria’s Dangote had commissioned a range of its proprietary equipment for the refinery being built in Lekki Free Trade zone on the outskirts of Lagos.

The project is to become the biggest single-train refinery in the world and would include a gas plant, a fertiliser plant and a petrochemicals plant.

DuPont is to supply technology that would make the alkylation unit, the sulphuric acid regeneration unit, the sulphur recovery unit and the fluid catalytic cracking unit cleaner and more efficient, the company added in a statement.

“We are delighted to be supporting Dangote on a project that is of such critical importance to creating economic growth and opportunity in Nigeria,” said in the press release Eli Ben-Shoshan, the global business leader of DuPont Clean Technologies.

The Dangote refinery, whose planned capacity of some 650,000 bpd exceeds the combined capacity of Nigeria’s four existing state-owned refineries, is expected to start operations in early 2019, though some components such as the petrochemicals plant are scheduled to come on stream as early as later in 2017.