The giant Dangote Oil Refinery in Nigeria has become an exporter of refined products to the US and Europe. For decades African producers exported their crude oil to be refined in Rotterdam, Antwerp and the United States, and imported all of their refined products. The Dangote oil refinery has also begun to refine crude oil from other African oil producers.
While Nigeria’s crude imports in the first quarter of 2025 increased dramatically by 308.82 percent from the $340m recorded late last year, according to the Central Bank of Nigeria, imports of refined products collapsed by 87.5 percent. Fuel imports plummeted to just $310m, down drastically from the $2.48bn recorded in the final quarter of 2025. At the same time exports of refined products increased by twenty percent, reaching $2.37bn during this review period. Nigerian domestic crude production is not sufficient to feed the 650,000 barrels per day Dangote refinery.
Compare this to oil refinery capacity in the US, which has not built a new refinery since 1977, and is losing its total refinery capacity. Since last January, the U.S. has become the largest foreign supplier of crude to the Dangote facility and is importing refined products. Similarly the refineries in Rotterdam, home of the oil spot market, and Antwerp, which had been refinishing African crude, are decades old and can no longer keep up with demand.
There is also a South-South dynamic to this process. The Dangote refinery is refining Brazilian crude, per agreement with Petrobras, Brazil’s national oil company. Brazil also lacks sufficient refinery capacity to supply the local market.
African crude producers, including Ghana and Equatorial Guinea, are having their oil refined by the Dangote refinery, whose refined product is cheaper than importing from Europe or the United States. There is also a hard currency saving, since the US and European refineries demand to be paid in [US dollars or euros.]((https://psishipping.com/the-us-nigeria-fuel-flip-why-the-dangote-refinery-exports-are-a-shipping-game-changer/)
This process will continue as Aliko Dangote has begun expanding the capacity of his refinery to 1.4 million bpd, which will make it the largest and most advanced in the world. Dangote is in discussions to build a large refinery in East Africa, most likely in Kenya or Tanzania. Other oil producers, including Uganda, Angola and Mozambique, are also building oil refineries.
This same process, the reversing of the neo-colonial legacy of exporting raw materials, will soon be underway in other sectors, such as steel, copper, aluminum and other minerals, as the trend grows in African countries to transform their raw minerals into refined products.
