Nigeria’s Dangote Refinery has triggered a sharp 23 per cent fall in West Africa’s imports of clean petroleum products within a single month, according to fresh shipping data.
The figures were compiled by S&P Global Commodities at Sea and reported by Punch Newspapers on Monday. They show regional imports of refined fuel dropped to 765,000 barrels per day in May. That is down from 997,000 barrels per day in April.
The Dangote Refinery sits on the Lekki Free Trade Zone outside Lagos and is Africa’s largest single train refining facility.
Shipping body BIMCO confirmed the trend in its latest weekly market briefing. BIMCO said West Africa’s clean product imports fell by 44 per cent over the period it reviewed.
BIMCO’s chief shipping analyst, Niels Rasmussen, linked the decline directly to the Dangote Refinery’s growing output. He said the 650,000 barrel per day plant in Lagos has displaced large volumes of imported fuel across the region.
The Lagos-based Dangote Refinery reached its full 650,000 barrel per day capacity in February, BIMCO said. It now supplies the bulk of Nigeria’s domestic fuel needs.
The Economist Intelligence Unit said the Dangote Refinery met nearly 80 per cent of Nigeria’s petrol demand in April. Some industry reports suggest that share could rise to 90 per cent before long.
Nigeria was once West Africa’s biggest petrol importer. Data from Kpler, cited by Argus Media, shows Nigeria’s net petrol imports fell to just 40,000 barrels per day in September. A year earlier, the figure stood at 332,000 barrels per day.
The Rotterdam to Lagos fuel corridor, long a key route for tankers carrying refined products into Nigeria, has weakened sharply as a result. S&P Global Commodities at Sea analysts said Nigerian clean product imports fell 39 per cent year on year by mid 2025.
This shift has hit the offshore storage hub at Lome, in neighbouring Togo, particularly hard. Lome had long served as a redistribution point for fuel cargoes heading into Nigeria and across West Africa, BIMCO said.
Rasmussen said Lome’s position as a major offshore storage and import hub may never recover its former volumes from Nigeria. He added that the hub could still serve smaller regional markets in future.
A 34 fold increase in fuel volumes arriving from the Americas helped offset some of the overall decline in tanker traffic, BIMCO data shows.
The Dangote Refinery is now exporting surplus fuel from Lagos to neighbouring countries including Ghana, Togo and Ivory Coast. Shipments have also reached destinations as far afield as South Korea, the United States and Europe.
Industry observers describe the change as a shift from long haul imports towards shorter regional shuttle voyages. These trips increase how often tankers call at West African ports, even though they cover fewer overall miles.
Nigeria’s downstream regulator, the NMDPRA, has suspended petrol import licences for several major oil marketing firms. Conoil, MRS Nigeria and a TotalEnergies subsidiary were among those affected, with the trio accounting for roughly a quarter of West Africa’s gasoline imports as of January.
Dangote has also begun building a second crude processing unit at the site. The new unit will add 700,000 barrels per day of capacity and is expected online by the end of 2028, more than doubling the Dangote Refinery’s current output.
If the expansion proceeds on schedule, it could push more West African countries further away from imported fuel. That would deepen the squeeze on tanker traffic along Atlantic routes that have served the region for decades.
The Dangote Refinery is increasingly positioned as a structural turning point in West Africa’s energy landscape, reducing import dependence while reshaping regional fuel trade flows and strengthening Nigeria’s role as a downstream refining hub.
