Dangote Industries Limited has acquired an additional 4,000 pieces of construction equipment as part of plans to expand its Lekki refinery to a capacity of 1.4 million barrels per day.

The latest acquisition brings the company’s construction equipment fleet to 6,500 machines.

The Group Vice President, Oil and Gas and Fertiliser, Devakumar Edwin, disclosed this on Friday while briefing editors during a tour of the refinery in Ibeju-Lekki, Lagos.

Edwin said Dangote initially acquired 2,563 pieces of equipment after Julius Berger and other contractors indicated that they lacked the capacity to construct the refinery’s main factory buildings.

“We ended up buying 2,563 pieces of equipment. We became the second largest company in the world in terms of construction equipment. Today, we are the largest because of the expansion. We have bought 4,000 more pieces of equipment; we have 6,500 pieces of construction equipment. We bought 330 cranes,” he said.

He noted that the decision to acquire the equipment instead of engaging foreign engineering, procurement and construction contractors was made by Dangote Group President, Aliko Dangote, after the company found that using overseas contractors would substantially increase the project’s cost.

“If I bring in a foreign contractor, I’ll have to ship in all his equipment, and I’ll have to ship back all his equipment, and those guys will also try to depreciate their equipment by adding it to our cost. By the end of the day, we end up paying a lot of money. So my president said, very well, let’s go and buy all the construction equipment,” he said.

Edwin said Julius Berger had declined to handle the construction of the refinery’s main process buildings after reviewing the project’s drawings.

“They said, sorry, we cannot do any of your factory buildings. We don’t have the capacity,” he said.

He said the construction firm later took responsibility for 43 of the refinery’s 127 auxiliary buildings, including canteens, transformer rooms, control rooms and fire-fighting houses.

According to Edwin, Dangote’s decision to build its own fleet of construction equipment was also driven by Nigeria’s infrastructure deficit.

He recalled that when the company constructed its Apapa sugar refinery in 1998, Nigeria had only two large cranes, each with a lifting capacity of 150 tonnes.

For the Lekki refinery project, Dangote hired one of only two 5,000-tonne cranes in the world and purchased 330 cranes of its own to support the construction work.

“When we are operating in a country with an infrastructure deficit, it takes a lot of time to plan, a lot of money to invest in all these things that industries do not require,” he stated.