Nigeria does not need to sell every barrel it pumps. It needs to keep enough at home, priced sensibly, to stop taxing its own economy through the price of fuel.
That is the entire logic of a phased domestic crude allocation policy: direct the crude required to meet Nigeria’s own fuel needs — not the full nameplate capacity of any single refinery — to domestic refining at a discount, in place of international sale. Done at the right scale, it delivers the lowest sustainable fuel price economy-wide and creates the fiscal space to fund security, education, and judicial reform. Done at the wrong scale, it becomes economically sound but fiscally reckless. The difference is sizing.
Sizing the policy correctly
The number that should anchor this policy is domestic consumption, not any refinery’s total processing capacity. Petrol demand has run between roughly 51 and 60 million litres per day through early 2026, with diesel adding a further 19 to 24 million litres, alongside smaller volumes of kerosene and LPG. Converted to crude equivalent, that basket requires somewhere between 350,000 and 450,000 barrels per day — the volume that determines the real scale of the trade-off, independent of any refinery’s broader export ambitions.
