Page 5 - DMEA Week 24 2022

DMEA COMMENTARY DMEA

unable to finance fresh purchases of crude feed- Nigeria, where a combined 1.49mn bpd+ of new,
stock, and Saudi-Ethiopian majority owner upgraded or revamped capacity is set to come
Mohamed al-Amoudi reneged on a promised into operation in the next few years.
capital injection. Al-Amoudi’s Sweden-based The former is nearing completion of an
Corrall Petroleum Holdings held a 67% stake in upgrade and 25,000 bpd expansion of the
the company. Luanda refinery as it closes in on the long-
In late September 2016, Corrall’s legal ave- awaited addition of more facilities with plants at
nues were exhausted, as the Court of Cassation Cabinda (60,000 bpd), Soyo (100,000 bpd) and
confirmed the verdict, ruling that the wind-up Lobito (200,000 bpd).
should proceed. Creditors owed part of SAMIR’s Meanwhile, in Nigeria, the local NOC is
estimated MAD44bn ($4.6bn) debt queued up expecting to bring 50,000 bpd of capacity back
to have their claims validated by the courts in on stream at its Port Harcourt refinery next year,
order to secure a slice of the proceeds from the as part of a wider, multi-billion-dollar plan to
sell-off. breathe life into four underutilised and poorly
Various bids by investors have failed, and maintained refineries with a combined capacity
while the energy ministry has said that reacti- of 445,000 bpd.
vating the refinery will not be possible until legal By far the largest and most significant of the
proceedings are concluded, there are fears that additions will come from the 650,000 bpd Dan-
the cost of resuming operations could be almost gote refinery and petrochemicals complex at
as high as constructing a new refinery. Lekki near Lagos.
The outlook appears almost as gloomy in Details about the plant, which is now seen
South Africa, where two of the country’s six coming into operations in early 2023 at a reduced
refineries (Engen and Sapref) have already shut capacity of 540,000 bpd when it is fully commis-
down – likely permanently – a decision on the sioned, emerged when an internal document
fate of another (Natref) is due to be taken this was leaked to local media this week.
year, a fourth (Astron) is recovering from a fire This said that the refinery has been designed
and another (Mossel Bay GTL) is struggling to handle grades of African crude, several Mid-
for feedstock. This leaves Sasol’s 160,000 bpd dle Eastern grades and US light oil (LTO). It
Secunda coal-to-liquids (CTL) plant as the only added that this will be processed to produce
fully functional unit – it is even undergoing an gasoline (33,571 tonnes per day), diesel (15,197
improvement programme. tpd), jet fuel (14,849 tpd), LPG (717 tpd), poly-
However, conventional refineries have been propylene (1,980 tpd) and other value-added
plagued by years of uncertainty and this their fuels (5,154 tpd).
operating environment will become even more All of these products are in high demand
challenging in September 2023, once the Clean throughout the continent and while Dangote
Fuels 2 (CF2) legislation comes into effect, man- is expected primarily to benefit the Nigerian
dating the use of ultra-low-sulphur gasoline and market, new refineries suited to process var-
diesel products with which existing units cannot ious crude grades are a significant shot in the
comply. arm for intra-continental trade and as pipeline
infrastructure continues to be developed, this
Encouragement may provide new opportunities to struggling or
The situation is somewhat rosier in Angola and closed facilities.™

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