Fuel depots push petrol above N1,200/litre as Dangote halts gantry loading

Private depot owners across Nigeria have begun quoting petrol at roughly N1,200 a litre, marketers said Thursday, after Dangote Petroleum Refinery suspended gantry loading, according to findings by BusinessDay.

A survey by Petroleumprice.ng, an authoritative digital platform for petroleum pricing, downstream industry news, and marketplace services in Nigeria, showed depots in Lagos, Warri, Port Harcourt and Calabar have moved Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) prices to between N1,200 and N1,230 a litre on Thursday.

Dangote halted product loading at about 4 p.m. Wednesday, the digital platform said in a note seen by BusinessDay.

The practical effect is likely to be felt within days at the pump, as filling stations that draw from Lagos, Warri, Port Harcourt and Calabar depots pass on the higher landing costs.

“When the gantry goes quiet, everybody down the chain starts marking up,” said one Lagos-based depot operator, who asked not to be named because he was not authorised to speak publicly. “Nobody wants to be caught selling old stock at old prices when the replacement cost resets higher.”

Industry sources familiar with the matter said the refinery is reassessing elements of its pricing and transaction framework, including the fallout from its move last week to invoice buyers in dollars rather than naira.

The company has issued no public statement on the pause and has not revised its posted ex-depot price, leaving marketers to guess at its next move.

Further findings showed Aiteo and NIPCO in Lagos now selling PMS at N1,200 a litre. In Warri, Optima has priced product at N1,220, while A.Y.M. Shafa has gone to N1,230. In Port Harcourt, Liquid Bulk and Sigmund are both quoting N1,230, matched by Mainland Depot in Calabar.

“Whatever affects the refinery’s cost of operations will eventually affect product pricing,” said Chukwudi Akadike, national publicity secretary of the Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria, who has cautioned that dollar-based sales make further pump-price increases hard to avoid.

IPMAN has pressed President Bola Tinubu’s government to preserve the naira-for-crude arrangement that had underpinned Dangote’s local pricing since October 2024.

The refinery moved on July 13 to price petrol, diesel and jet fuel in dollars, $0.779 a litre for gantry PMS, ending naira settlement and invalidating pro forma invoices issued under the old system.

Industry sources have tied the switch to a widening gap between the dollar cost of imported and NNPC-supplied crude and naira proceeds from domestic sales, a mismatch the company has said it needs to close to keep operating sustainably.

Not every voice in the industry sees the shift as destabilising.

Muda Yusuf, chief executive of the Centre for the Promotion of Private Enterprise, has argued that a refinery buying most of its feedstock in dollars is taking a rational step by aligning its revenue currency with its cost base, rather than signalling distress.

Yusuf advised that the policy response in this instance should therefore focus on addressing the underlying structural constraints rather than the pricing decision itself

“The enduring solution lies in increasing domestic crude availability, deepening foreign exchange stability and reducing Nigeria’s dependence on imported feedstock. Only then can the full economic benefits of domestic refining be realised,” Yusuf added.

But Billy Gillis-Harry, president of the Petroleum Products Retail Outlets Owners Association of Nigeria, has warned the policy risks nudging the domestic fuel trade toward informal dollarisation, with marketers passing on foreign-exchange costs at the pump.

Crude Oil Refiners Association of Nigeria publicity secretary Iche Idoko has framed the episode as less about currency preference than about whether local refiners are receiving enough crude under the government’s naira-for-crude framework to avoid dollar exposure in the first place. He has called on the petroleum ministry to convene refiners, crude producers and regulators to address allocation shortfalls he says are forcing refiners toward foreign-currency financing.

Dangote Refinery, a 650,000-barrel-a-day plant that has become the dominant price-setter in Nigeria’s downstream market since starting operations less than two years ago, has not said when gantry loading will resume.

Marketers said they are watching for any fresh notice from the company’s commercial operations unit, the same channel that announced the dollar-pricing switch, as the clearest indication of where official prices – and, by extension, the rest of the market — are headed next.