Nigeria’s fuel trade has undergone a dramatic reversal since the arrival of the Dangote refinery, with petroleum product exports surging more than seven-fold while seaborne imports have fallen to less than a third of their 2023 level.
Nigeria exported an average of 350,000 barrels of petroleum products per day in the second quarter of 2026, up from an annual average of just 46,000 barrels per day in 2023, according to new data published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
At the same time, Nigeria’s seaborne petroleum product imports fell below 130,000 barrels per day, compared with nearly 400,000 barrels per day three years earlier.
The figures provide one of the clearest indications yet of how the Dangote Petroleum Refinery is changing a long-standing contradiction in Africa’s oil industry, where one of the continent’s major crude producers depended heavily on imported refined fuel.
Exports to Europe reached an average of 130,000 barrels per day in the second quarter, nearly nine times the 15,000 barrels per day shipped to the continent in 2023.
