By The Atlantic Digest, Business Desk | Tuesday Edition
Fuel shortages triggered by the U.S. war with Iran will persist long after the fighting itself ends, David Bird, chief executive of Nigeria’s Dangote Petroleum Refinery, told Reuters — pointing to war-damaged Middle Eastern refining capacity and the sheer scale of the task of rebuilding depleted fuel stocks as reasons the disruption will outlive the conflict that caused it.
WHY THE SHORTAGE WON’T END WHEN THE WAR DOES
Bird’s argument, as relayed by Reuters, rests on two structural problems that a ceasefire alone cannot fix. First, the global refining system entered the conflict already running at elevated utilization, leaving little spare capacity to absorb a shock; Middle Eastern refiners, already carrying a backlog of deferred maintenance, then sustained direct damage from the fighting, physically reducing how much fuel the region can produce even once hostilities stop. Second, the war forced countries to draw down fuel reserves to cover the gap, and refilling those stocks — on top of resuming normal output — will take considerably longer than resuming the flow of crude through the Strait of Hormuz will. Nations are also now prioritizing supply-security planning and building larger strategic buffers than they held before the war, a shift in posture that Bird suggested will keep global demand for spare refining capacity elevated even after the immediate crisis passes.
THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE WARNING
The disruption’s scale is considerable. Roughly one-fifth of global oil transits the Strait of Hormuz, and CITAC, the energy consultancy, estimates that about 75 percent of refined fuel imports into eastern and southern Africa normally originate in the Middle East — a dependency that left the region acutely exposed once the war curtailed that flow. The effects have already shown up in consumer prices and rationing measures far from the fighting: Somalia’s capital has seen fuel prices nearly double, and Ethiopia has directed fuel stations to prioritize public transport over private consumption.
Dangote’s own numbers illustrate both the opportunity and the strain the war has created. The refinery reported $1.82 billion in after-tax profit for the first half of 2026, a sharp reversal from a $476 million loss the previous full year, as the 650,000-barrel-per-day plant — which only reached full capacity in February — became one of the war’s principal beneficiaries. It has since been described as the world’s largest single exporter of jet fuel, shipping significant volumes into Europe as Middle Eastern supply tightened. Aliko Dangote, the refinery’s founder, summed up the shift in market psychology bluntly: “Right now it is not about pricing, it’s about availability.”
That availability crunch has pulled in customers well beyond Nigeria. Ghana, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, South Africa and Senegal have all approached the refinery for supply contracts, with South Africa said to be seeking a 12-month deal. Bird has said the refinery intends to prioritize Nigeria’s domestic market first amid the crunch, with roughly 75 percent of current output already allocated at home and the remainder available for export — though the flow is not always straightforward: between March and May, Reuters and other outlets reported that 70 to 80 percent of Nigeria’s own maritime fuel imports were, in effect, Dangote’s own product re-entering the country after being exported through Togo’s Lomé trading hub, an arbitrage loop that has confused consumers expecting a more direct domestic price benefit.
WHY NIGERIANS AREN’T NECESSARILY PAYING LESS
The war’s dynamics also explain a paradox Bird has addressed separately: even a fully domestic refinery does not insulate Nigerian consumers from global price swings. “We are fully exposed to the international commodity market. That needs to be widely understood,” Bird has said, noting that only 30 to 35 percent of the refinery’s crude feedstock is Nigerian, with the rest sourced internationally and paid for in dollars, and that all crude — including Nigerian barrels bought under the naira-for-crude programme — is priced against international benchmarks rather than at a domestic discount. He cited the scale of the shock directly: Brent crude jumped from the mid-$60s to roughly $118 a barrel within a single week at the war’s height, while tanker freight costs on some routes surged from around $800,000 to $3.5 million per shipment. Dangote, he said, is working to “minimise costs throughout our supply chain,” but those global cost pressures flow through to the pump regardless of where the barrel was refined.
EXPANSION AS THE LONG-TERM ANSWER
Dangote’s response to a shortage its own CEO says will outlast the war has been to bet on scale. The company is pursuing a roughly $14.3 billion expansion to double refining capacity to 1.4 million barrels per day by 2028 — a target that would put it in the range of India’s Jamnagar refinery, the world’s largest — alongside a separate, previously announced plan to build a second refinery in Kenya, extending the group’s refining footprint into East Africa. Aliko Dangote’s personal fortune has risen by roughly $5 billion over the course of 2026 amid the refinery’s war-driven windfall, to an estimated $34.8 billion.
WHETHER THE ADVANTAGE SURVIVES THE PEACE
Industry analysts caution that Dangote’s current dominance is substantially crisis-driven, and that it faces a harder task once the emergency passes: competing on price against traditional Middle Eastern suppliers rather than simply on availability. The refinery retains real structural advantages — an Atlantic coastal location, proximity to West African markets, and shipping capacity few regional rivals can match — but its 12-month emergency supply contracts will eventually expire, and competitors are already stirring: Algeria’s state energy firm, Sonatrach, has begun contesting Dangote’s position in Niger’s jet fuel market. A further structural vulnerability sits beneath the entire story: no African country currently holds the International Energy Agency’s recommended 90-day strategic reserve of refined fuel, leaving the continent generally exposed to the next supply shock regardless of how this one resolves.
DOMESTIC CONTEXT
The shortage narrative sits awkwardly alongside a separate, longer-running domestic frustration: despite hosting Africa’s largest refinery, Nigeria still imported an estimated 43 percent of its fuel needs as of July, a gap Nigerian officials and industry figures have linked to regulatory friction between Dangote and the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA) rather than to the refinery’s raw production capacity, which by Bird’s own account is now running at full stretch.
Editorial note: This report is built on Reuters’ original interview with David Bird as relayed and corroborated across multiple outlets, alongside separate, independently reported remarks by Bird and Aliko Dangote on pricing and feedstock exposure. Figures on Middle Eastern import dependency are attributed to CITAC; production, profit and expansion figures are as reported by Dangote Petroleum Refinery and financial press coverage and have not been independently audited by the Atlantic Digest. The Atlantic Digest will update this report if Reuters publishes additional detail from the underlying interview.
