Dangote Cement invests $250m in coal power plants

Frustrated by the quandaries of unreliable power supply from the national grid and increasingly dwindling gas and Low Pour Fuel Oil supply, some manufacturers in the country are desperately probing for solutions to their potency quandaries.

For instance, the management of Dangote Cement Plc promulgated on Thursday that it was making a $250m investment in coal-fired power plants in its Obajana, Ibeshe and Gboko plants.

Already on ground, according to the company, are the obligatory equipment for the construction of the plants as well as the first consignment of coal, all imported from South Africa.

The Group Managing Director, Dangote Cement, Mr. Edwin Devakumar, verbalized the gas and LPFO supply situation in the country was getting worse, with gas-fired power plants and industries utilizing the product to power their processes being starved of gas.

For LPFO, he verbally expressed the situation had reached a critical stage, as the company had in the last six months been importing the product due to its scarcity in the country, integrating that afore then, Nigeria used to export the fuel to other countries.

Within the period, he verbalized the company had taken distribution of three vessels of LPFO imported through the Apapa Ports, with each carrying 30,000 tonnes of the product, while each of the coal plants would have capacity to engender 30 megawatts of electricity.

In integration, Devakumar verbally expressed the company had to rent tank farms in Apapa, Lagos and Calabar, Cross River State, to discharge the imported LPFO into afore transferring it to the cement plants.

He verbalized, “We appeal to the regime to do something about the quandaries of gas and LPFO supply. If we don’t have power and fuel, businesses cannot survive. If not resolved exigently, the situation will compound the quandary of unemployment and insecurity in the country.

“It will impact on companies’ profitability. We have already lost about 10 per cent of our capacity and that signifies less cement in the market. We have, however, incremented our engenderment lines to take care of any shortfall.”

Devakumar verbally expressed the group was additionally visually examining exploring the opportunity in the local coal industry, as supplies from within the country would be more frugal on the long run, integrating that Dangote Cement was of the notion that it could have much local coal in 12 to 18 months if all the variables worked well.