Aliko Dangote has committed to building a 650,000-barrels-per-day oil refinery at the Port of Tanga, Tanzania, contingent on reaching agreement with the Tanzanian government. The pledge, modelled on his USD 20 billion Lagos facility, comes with a delivery timeline of four to five years from project sanction. No contract or formal agreement has been signed; this remains a public commitment and is subject to government negotiations.
The proposed refinery would process crude sourced from four countries — the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, South Sudan, and Uganda — positioning Tanga as a potential regional refining hub for East and Central Africa. To enable feedstock supply, Dangote has also proposed a new pipeline connecting Mombasa to Tanga, which would in turn link to the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP). EACOP, running from Uganda's Lake Albert fields to the Tanzanian coast, is already under development and would serve as a critical upstream artery for the proposed scheme.
The scale of the Tanga proposal mirrors the Lagos refinery in nameplate capacity, suggesting Dangote intends to replicate a vertically integrated crude-to-products model on the East African seaboard. If realised, a 650,000 bpd refinery would rank among the largest on the African continent and would materially alter regional product trade flows, reducing import dependency across landlocked East African markets. The Mombasa-Tanga pipeline segment adds a cross-border infrastructure layer that would require coordination between Kenya and Tanzania alongside the existing EACOP consortium framework.
At this stage the project is a heads-of-agreement-level intention at most — no block award, no engineering contract, and no financing structure has been disclosed. Given that Dangote's Lagos refinery took over a decade from announcement to first output, market participants should treat the four-to-five-year timeline as aspirational. Norwegian service companies should monitor developments and focus on relationship-building with both the Tanzanian Petroleum Development Corporation and EACOP project stakeholders rather than pursuing procurement engagement at this point.