By Radarr Africa Business Desk
LAGOS, November 3 (Radarr Africa) – Crude deliveries to the Dangote Refinery in Lekki reached a record 735,000 barrels a day in October, the second consecutive monthly high, according to a BusinessDay report published on Tuesday.
The volume is above the refinery’s stated capacity of 700,000 barrels a day, or about 5 per cent higher. BusinessDay, which attributed the figures to Argus tracking data, said September receipts stood at 665,000 barrels a day, so October was 70,000 barrels a day higher than the month before.
Deliveries have climbed steadily through the year. Between January and October, the plant received an average of 590,000 barrels a day, compared with 410,000 barrels a day across the whole of 2025, the newspaper reported. That is an increase of roughly 44 per cent on the 2025 average. Since April, the average has been 650,000 barrels a day, which leaves October’s record 85,000 barrels a day above the run rate of the past seven months.
BusinessDay linked the rise to the end of planned work on a crude distillation unit in the first quarter of 2026. It said minor work on the refinery’s 218,000-barrel-a-day residual fluid catalytic cracker in July caused only a small interruption to receipts. The refinery took a record 23 deliveries in October.
Nigerian grades made up 80 per cent of October receipts, down from 87 per cent in September, the report said. The balance was US West Texas Intermediate (WTI), which the report put at 140,000 barrels a day.
Bonny Light was the largest single grade, at 165,000 barrels a day, followed by WTI and then Qua Iboe at 95,000 barrels a day. Amenam supplied 65,000 barrels a day and Forcados 60,000 barrels a day. Escravos, Brass River, Utapate, CJ Blend and Bonga each supplied 35,000 barrels a day, while Cawthorne supplied 25,000 barrels a day and Okwuibome 10,000 barrels a day.
On quality, the weighted average of the crude received in October was 36.9 degrees API with 0.15 per cent sulphur, unchanged from September, according to the Argus assessment cited by BusinessDay. The ten-month average was 37.1 degrees API and 0.15 per cent sulphur. The 2025 average was 36.8 degrees API and 0.2 per cent sulphur.
Looking ahead, BusinessDay said there was no sign of a slowdown in November. Two cargoes of 1 million barrels each, of Escravos and Forcados, were near the discharge buoys, and a similar cargo of Amenam was on its way.
The newspaper added a caution on interpretation. Deliveries above capacity do not necessarily mean the plant processed more than 700,000 barrels a day, because crude can be held in storage. The report did not give figures for how much crude the refinery actually processed or how much product it produced in the month.
BusinessDay said the Dangote Refinery has become a major buyer of Nigerian grades. It also noted that the plant’s purchases of WTI link it to Atlantic Basin crude flows, so its feedstock choices now connect it to the wider Atlantic Basin market as well as to Nigerian producers.
The report was written by Oladehinde Oladipo and carried in BusinessDay’s Energy section.
