Africa's largest oil refinery and the world's biggest single-train refiner, Dangote Refinery, is set to begin fuel production as the first crude oil shipment from Agbami arrives at the facility Thursday.

THISDAY exclusively gathered that the oil tanker, MT OTIS (owned by Trafigura) with BL QTY 999,748 barrels of Agbami Crude grade from Chevron terminal, supplied by Shell Trading, arrived at the Dangote Terminal ahead of the estimated 7pm time of arrival.

It was gathered that the oil tanker set sail on December 6 and arrived at Dangote Terminal Thursday from the Chevron Terminal.

The Dangote Oil Refinery, situated in the Lekki Free Zone, on the outskirts of Lagos, is a 650,000 barrels per day integrated refinery. The Dangote Petroleum Refinery also has the largest Pipeline Infrastructure with 1,100 kilometers to handle 3 billion Standard Cubic feet of gas per day.

When fully operational, the refinery will meet 100 percent of the Nigerian requirement of all refined products and also have a surplus of each of these products for export.

The over $19 billion refinery is designed to process Nigerian crude with the ability to also process other crudes.

The refinery has suffered strings of delays since construction began in 2016 with excavation and infrastructure preparation. It was initially billed for completion in 2018. It was however inaugurated on May 22, 2023.

In September 2023, the refinery announced that it would start producing diesel and kerosene in October and gasoline in November.

The arrival of the first crude shipment from Agbami marks a milestone in the production process of the refinery.