Aliko Dangote's refinery lifts Nigeria's petrol exports sixfold to $750 million

Nigeria earned $750 million (N998.5 billion) from petrol exports in the first six months of 2026, a sixfold jump that analysts attribute to Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote's refinery reaching scale just as the war in Iran squeezed refined fuel supplies to Africa.

The National Bureau of Statistics' second-quarter trade report puts petrol seventh among Nigeria's exports at $410 million (N546 billion), or 2% of a record $20.3 billion (N27 trillion) in total shipments.

Crude oil led at $9.7 billion (N12.9 trillion), followed by jet fuel at $2.2 billion, natural gas, urea, other petroleum gases and diesel. African buyers took $467 million (N621.7 billion) of the half-year petrol total, most of it in West Africa.

The change from a year earlier is stark. In the first quarter of 2025, petrol did not appear among Nigeria's exports at all; it was one of the largest imports, at $1.32 billion (N1.76 trillion). It surfaced on the export list in Q2 2025 at $64 million (N85.8 billion). The Q2 2026 figure is more than six times that.

Two forces drove the shift, Abeeblahi Rufai, an investment research analyst, told Punch. The first was the Dangote refinery moving past its ramp-up phase, after outages at its residue fluid catalytic cracker had held back gasoline output through early 2025 and the naira-for-crude arrangement kept supply pointed at the domestic market.

The second was the Iran war, which closed the Strait of Hormuz, cut refined product flows from the Gulf and Asia, and left African importers that had relied on ADNOC, Aramco, Oman and India looking for closer suppliers. Lagos, with shorter shipping distances, became the alternative.

Tomiwa Adeniji of CardinalStone Securities said Nigeria's usable refining capacity had gone from about 400,000 barrels a day at 1% utilisation before Dangote to 1.1 million barrels at about 62%. "Nigeria has now transitioned to being a net exporter of refined petroleum products," she said.

The petrol line alone tells a more complicated story. The same NBS report shows Nigeria imported $715 million (N952 billion) of petrol in the second quarter, almost 11 times the Q1 figure and $305 million (N406 billion) more than it exported, as marketers continued to bring in cargoes during a public dispute with Dangote over pricing and supply. On refined products as a whole Nigeria is now a net exporter; on petrol specifically, the second quarter went the other way.

Ayo Teriba, chief executive of Economic Associates, said the direction is set regardless. The refinery began with import substitution and now supplies more than half of local demand, he said, and "an item that had dominated our import list is now beginning to diminish in our import list and is now emerging as a dominant commodity in our export story."

The next leg depends on crude. Dangote's refinery runs at 700,000 barrels a day and is expanding to 1.4 million by 2029; feeding it requires Nigerian production to rise.

Minister of State for Petroleum Heineken Lokpobiri said this week that active rigs have grown from about a dozen to more than 65 and that the country targets 3 million barrels a day. Whether the export column keeps growing faster than the import column is the number to watch in the Q3 report.