 for a very first hot topic and it's going to be on something that you and I are very very much interested in. Nigeria's oil industry will be marking a significant moment today as the 650,000 barrels per day Angotir refinery gets commissioned in Lagos, a shift from government operating refineries to the private sector. What do we know about this and how can the Nigerian economy and Nigerians generally benefit from it? We have been joined by Andy AgboTV, a social reformer, author and thinker. Alright, Nick Agole Abagyapardin is going to be my guest this morning. Apparently we have a slight change. Nick Agole, good morning to you. Good morning and good morning to our viewers. You're welcome. How is it over there in the UK? It's very fine. We're okay. The weather for us, when we see the sun out there, it's always very fine. We will not complain. Alright, so well this Angotir refinery, the company is boasting that it's the world's largest single-train refinery and could meet 100% of the country's requirement of all refined products and enough to even export. Are we finally looking at saying goodbye permanently to fuel crisis in Nigeria? Nick, do you think so? Yes, indeed. We are looking at waving bye-bye permanently to fuel crisis in Nigeria with the communal stream of the Angotir refinery because we will not have a refinery in our own backyard that is able to supply to us 100% of our petroleum product needs. So the issues that we have currently with supply chain and all of that, we come to an end. So yes, it's going to be a new day for us as far as petroleum products is concerned. What many other companies have been given violate licenses to operate, as of 2020 we have 17 of them that were given licenses to operate. Why haven't they come on board as Angotir is doing right now? That's typical of Nigerians. When something comes, we just jump into it. We don't estimate what it takes to jump into it. We just want to be part of the bandwagon. And so that is why people rushed to get refinery licenses and they have not been able to put together the technical and financial requirements to get their refineries off the ground. So there is something that has to do with running a business. You first have to have a business plan. And it's on the basis of the business plan that you begin to execute your business strategy. In Nigeria, people, when the government announces that we want to give refinery licenses, people first jump and collect the licenses before settling down to now begin to plan. And it is during the planning phase with the license in their hands that they now discover that they are unable to get the refinery off the ground because of the technical and commercial implications of what is required. Well, this refinery will be saving Nigeria billions of dollars annually. Do you see a situation where we no longer need to import at all? Absolutely, absolutely. The dangote refinery at a production capacity of 650,000 barrels of crude oil per day is going to take as currently Nigeria's production. The dangote refinery is going to take 50% of every crude oil that Nigeria produces because we're currently producing about 1.3 million barrels per day. So 50% of that is going to be fed into the dangote refinery. And that is going to bring out products that are well above Nigeria's daily requirement. You see, a lot of things are going to come with dangote refinery. First and foremost, let us assume that the cost of producing a liter of petrol, premium motor spirit, PMS, at the dangote refinery is exactly the same as the cost of producing the same one liter of PMS in a refinery in Rotterdam or in Houston or in Singapore. The immediate advantage of the dangote refinery over the Singapore Rotterdam or Houston refinery is that the petrol that is produced in those foreign refineries will need to be shipped into Nigeria. So you pay high shipping costs, high insurance costs, high port charges, high handling charges in addition to whatever costs that Singapore or Rotterdam or Houston refinery has produced a liter for. That is what dangote refinery will eliminate. So even if their cost of production is the same, dangote refinery's products will be cheaper than those coming from abroad because those costs that are paid to move petrol from those foreign refineries into Nigeria will be eliminated. That is the first thing. The second thing is that even if the government is going ahead to pay subsidies on dangote refinery's petrol costs because I believe that dangote refinery's petrol refining costs will be probably more than the government control price, which I think is about 185 Naira now of petrol. So even if the government were to pay subsidies on dangote refinery's petroleum products, or in fact they are just paying subsidies now on petrol, PMS, it will still be better for Nigeria in many ways. One, we are currently paying subsidies on the expensive production costs of foreign refineries. Like here in the UK, where I'm speaking to you now, minimum wage here in the UK is 1,000 pounds. So whoever you employ in a refinery here in the UK, you must pay them at least 1,000 pounds even if they are just sweeping the floor for you. And if you convert 1,000 pounds into Naira, it's almost a million Naira. So government has been picking up the fees of high costs of production by refineries abroad. That is going to be saved by dangote refinery. Secondly, the refinery here, when they produce, they pay taxes to the government. The refineries in UK, Singapore, wherever, they pay taxes to the UK government and then they put the cost of those taxes in their production costs, which again our government has been paying for through subsidies. And then also, when we pay subsidies on petrol that is produced by foreign refinery, we are also paying salaries of the workers in those refineries abroad. But in dangote refinery, majority of the workers are Nigerians. So even if the government is paying subsidy on the products from dangote refinery, the government is invariably giving money to dangote refinery to pay salaries of Nigerians and then to pay invoices of Nigerian companies that are making supplies into that refinery. So at the end of the day, dangote refinery is going to be a far better deal for us than going to import petrol and pay high costs to bring them into Nigeria. And not only that, not only that, the other thing that has been disturbing us about these few subsidies is that there are two metrics that are used to calculate subsidy. Two, number one, the quantity. Then number two, the price. Now, when you come to price, if you go to Singapore and buy petrol and then ship that petrol and bring it to Nigeria, we need to know that the landing cost of that petrol is, say, 250. If the landing cost of the petrol is 250 and the government says, no, set this petrol to Nigerians at 180. It then means government is paying subsidy of 17 IRA to make up that total cost of 250. But since this subsidy has been paid by government, nobody knows about these two metrics. Nobody knows about the quantity of petrol upon which you are paying subsidy. Today you will hear it's 50 million liters. Tomorrow it's 60 million liters. By 2015, when this current government came into office, we used to hear 30 million liters. Now we're hearing 60. And you ask yourself, has the number of cars on Nigerian roads doubled? What has made it that we are not paying subsidy on double the quantity of petrol? And again, nobody has ever told Nigerians what is the landing cost of this petrol. The petrol you are bringing from Houston or Rotterdam or Singapore, how much is it coming and landing in Nigeria so that we will not subtract and do the arithmetic ourselves and say, okay, if the government official price is 180 and you are landing it at this cost, then this is harmless subsidy. Nobody has been telling us that with dengote refinery, all those shenanigans will disappear because if dengote has a businessman, he knows the quantity of petrol he's going to put in the market. And those who are smuggling our petrol across the borders, if they like, they can come and carry dengote refinery product. He won't mind. If people in Benet Republic or Ghana say, give us 1 million litres of petrol, dengote will give them 1 million litres of petrol because they have said they have enough for local consumption and for export. So it's business. He's a businessman, a very, very intelligent businessman as we have seen, the richest man in Africa. But right now, Nick, let's take a break and listen to a track we have on this very subject. Everything in this plant by way of size is the first. A, it is the single largest single-train refinery in the world. There is no column which can process 650,000 barrels per day in one column, first of its kind. The capacity of RFCC builds the next best by miles. This is a 10 mmtp of plant, maximum which you have seen is 6, 7. This is way ahead of that. And to add to that, this is an RFCC. This is a lot more complex. You have probably one of the biggest hydrocrackers designed on a mild hydrocracking route, upwards of 7, 7.5 million tonnes capacity. One of the biggest MS blocks which you can have in the world. The towers which you see, the sizes of the furnaces, the reactor regenerator, it has touched the elastic limits of mechanical design. Beyond this, in a single train, it's practically not possible. Everything big which you talk of in the world is right here. All right, Nika Agoule. Nika Agoule. I'm here. Yes, so we just took a track of San Jakubta. He is the CEO of Dango Tepetrelium Refinery and Petrochemicals, explaining the hugeness of this project that they have embarked upon. I don't know if you heard what he had to say. As I heard in Verua, why it is good that we beat our chest, that we have the largest single train refinery in the world. I'm also looking at the risk of doing that. Because what that means is that the whole 650,000 barrels of maximum capacity are going to be put through a single production chain. And if anything happens to that production chain, just anything, that means Dango Tepetrelium Refinery will shut down. So for me, if I was asked, I would have preferred that they have at least two trains, maybe one train, 300,000 barrels, the other train, 350,000 barrels, so that even if one train goes down, the other train will continue to operate so that the refinery will continue to meet some of its obligations. But anyway, that is already watered under the drain. They have built this single train refinery. 650,000 barrels is a massive achievement. It is something that gives Nigeria a very good image because for a long time we have been the laughing stock in the interminational community. We have been like a farmer, one of the largest farmers in the world who could not cook food for his family to eat. And so instead we sell the raw food, they go and import pandediam, import cooked rice and a bag from other nations, paying more money than when they gave us for our cassava and our yam and our raw rice. We have been the laughing stock of the international community as one of the largest producers of crude oil in the world who cannot refine their products, who cannot, and like Gupta was saying there, the CEO, he was talking about furnaces. A furnace is a fiery fire. It is a container with so much fire, fire into hundreds of degrees. And that is actually the refining process. The refining process is for you to just cook crude oil, cook it with high intensity fire. And as the heat is intensifying, petroleum products will begin to be extracted. You extract petroleum products at a different degrees of temperature as you cook this crude oil. And it has been surprising that for all this long, Nigeria has been unable to cook crude oil for us to have abundance of crude oil because if you look at the oil industry, the upstream and the downstream, the upstream way they actually find crude oil. If you are to know that there is crude oil in Leki there and then go in and dig it and bring it out, requires far more technology, far more expertise, far more money to do that. And yet the foreign companies have been doing that successfully in Nigeria over the years. We have never had a case of we work on one day and they say Nigeria is producing zero barrels of crude oil because something or something. We have been consistently, for more than 50 years, producing crude oil every day. Then the simplest of the process, which is to cook that crude oil and produce petroleum products, which is in control of Nigerians and not just Nigerians, in control of the government, we have been unable to do for more than 30, 40 years. It has been a big shame and Dan Gote refining is coming to clear that shame off our eyes. And we hope that the incoming government will also clear another shame on our faces in that same oil industry, which is gas. As I speak to you now, you go to the Niger data. We are setting our gas, our produced gas that we suffer and spend money to produce. We are setting it on fire as if it has no value. Meanwhile, it is that gas that is the largest source of electricity generation around the world and Nigeria does not have electricity. Maybe now, plus TV could be on a generator. It's possible. Whereas the gas is burning. So the incoming government also needs to transfer all that into the private sector. Here we see what the private sector can do. We have a Nigerian government with four refineries that have been dead for 30, 40 years. And now a private sector man, Dan Gote, has come in to set up one of the world's biggest refineries. So government needs to not transfer their own refineries, the four of them, into the private sector. They also need to stop gas flaring so that Nigeria can generate enough electricity so that the economy can then boom. So yes, Dan Gote is good news for us today. Good news indeed. Nigerians are obviously waiting to see how much it will not cost us to buy fuel, how much it will not cost us to buy diesel and kerosene and every other thing that they will be producing. Especially now that it won't be important. Transportation, the cost of transportation removed. A whole lot. Exactly. You know, I told one of your messengers in one of the interviews that I had here. I told messengers that the few crises that we experience are the outset of the war in Ukraine. You know, the NNPC first came with a phantom story. Oh, the few crises was because we imported bad fuel. And then the bad fuel that was just for consumption of two to three days, now made few crises to be protracted. The truth of the matter is that the war in Ukraine disrupted supply chains across the world. First and foremost, the Western world banned buying crude oil from Russia. And Russia is supplying more than 10% of the global crude oil every day. So refineries in Europe, Singapore and elsewhere, they didn't have crude oil from Russia again. And that is why they could not supply us with petrol. And we started suffering a few crises in Nigeria. We dangled a refinery right there in a backyard in Lakey. Such thing will never happen again because they will be there to take our crude, produce the petrol and give us. In fact, I told Messi in that interview that imagine that we have a global event like COVID. You know, we have COVID flight with suspended totally across the world. Something that has never happened before. Now, assuming we have such an event where shipping, shipping is totally suspended, that there can be no ship that we move. How can Nigeria get petrol when no ship is moving? We will just be dead here. Our economy will just go dead. But we dangled a refinery in our backyard. Such a thing will never happen. Even if there is total ban on shipping in the world, dangled will continue to supply us with produce. Dangled is really a game changer. Yeah, the benefits of dangled refineries can never be emphasized. Part of the benefits we will be having is also the impact to have on forests. Discuss for an exchange that was used to import finished products will now be available for Nigerians. Solutely. Solutely. We have had a situation where you drive into a petrol station, you buy petrol in Naira. But that petrol was imported in dollars. So there is always a need to convert the Naira that we have been buying petrol with at the petrol stations into dollars so that we will go and bring products from foreign refineries. And that has put tremendous pressure on the Naira because the Naira is perpetually being used to source for dollars so that we will go and import. And any product whose demand is getting high, the cost of that product will also be high. So since we have been demanding dollar, which is a product, demanding it so much to go and buy petrol, that is why the cost of the dollar has been rising from about 150 Naira when the current government came into office to about 750 Naira today as we are speaking. So if Dan Gote is not giving us petrol in our backyard, the entire trillions of money, remember the subsidy alone is about 7 trillion a year. And know that subsidy is not the full cost, subsidy is just the top up. So the full cost will be multiples of that 7 trillion. Perhaps about 50, 60 trillion. We have been Naira that we have been using to buy dollar to go and import petrol will not be saved. So that will automatically begin to have positive impact on the foreign exchange rate because we will not be demanding dollar to import petrol and I expect that the cost of the dollar will start dropping. So that's a good thing that Dan Gote Refinery is bringing to us. Well as I said, the benefits of Dan Gote Refinery coming on board cannot be overemphasized. We are very indeed excited to see what's in store for us. Thank you so much Nika Gule for your time and insight on this very germane topic. Very crucial to us, not just as individuals but as a country. Thank you so, so very much. As we speak today, there are Nigerians in that refinery who are working at any given evening. There are businesses that are supplying to Dan Gote Refinery. It's just positive news everywhere you see. And there will be more money for government because Dan Gote Refinery will not be paying taxes to government. So it's good news all the way. Thank you Nika. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you and a nice day to have yours. Thank you. While you're still watching The Breakfast, it's the mindset Monday edition of The Breakfast Show. We'll give you weather report and then come back and take our very second hot topic. Stay with us.