Kenya will break ground on the proposed Lamu Refinery on September 30, 2026, bringing the Dangote Group’s planned East African refining project into its construction phase. The refinery is designed to process 700,000 barrels of crude oil per day.
Kenyan President William Ruto announced the date after visiting the Dangote Petroleum Refinery in Lagos, where he toured the Nigerian plant and received details of the company’s plans for Lamu.
The Kenyan project comes with a substantial power component. Its dedicated power plant is expected to generate about 1,000 megawatts (MW), while 500MW is expected to be available for sale to the Kenyan government. The arrangement is intended to supply the refinery and place excess electricity within Kenya’s power system.
Aliko Dangote, President and Chief Executive Officer of Dangote Group, told Ruto that the Lamu refinery will not be a replica of the Lagos facility. Some of the processing equipment planned for Kenya will be heavier than what is installed at the Nigerian refinery, and the Lamu plant will include a coker, a processing unit absent from the Lagos facility.
Dangote used the tour of the Nigerian refinery to give Ruto a sense of the scale of what is planned for Kenya.
“Here I will give you a sense of an idea of what we’re going to have in Kenya just that Kenya will be a little bit bigger than what you are going to see, Your Excellency, today,” he said.
The power plant will give the Lamu project a generation capacity twice that associated with the Nigerian refinery. Half of the projected output is intended for the Kenyan government, adding electricity supply to the range of infrastructure tied to the development.
Ruto said Kenya has already secured the land for the refinery. He added that the government is working on the other requirements needed to advance the project without administrative delays.
The Kenyan president also pointed to the skills and commercial activity that could arise around the refinery, citing engineering, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, business and other fields as areas where the project could create opportunities.
For Dangote Group, Lamu extends its refining interests into East Africa while giving the company another large-scale project with characteristics distinct from its Nigerian operation. The inclusion of a coker, heavier processing equipment and a 1,000MW power plant gives the proposed Kenyan refinery a configuration of its own.
With the groundbreaking fixed for September 30, attention now shifts to the physical development of a refinery planned to combine large-scale crude processing with substantial power infrastructure on Kenyan soil.
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