|
Listen to article
|
Some Nigerian filling stations reduced fuel pump prices on Tuesday after Dangote Refinery’s N100 per liter gantry price cut.
The Eastern Updates reports Ranoil and Sharon filling stations in Abuja slightly dropped fuel prices by N20 to N1,330 per liter on Tuesday from N1,350.
Meanwhile, The Eastern Updates reports that Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited retail outlets, MRS and AA Rano, raised their pump price on Tuesday morning to between N126,000 and N1,330 per liter as of Tuesday evening from around N1,090 per liter on Monday. These filling stations are yet to respond to Dangote Refinery’s gantry drop and the drop in global crude prices.
The Eastern Updates gathered that Automotive Gas Oil, known as diesel, has remained unchanged at N1,780 at Ranoil, AA Rano, and other filling stations in Abuja.
A manager at MRS filling station in Abuja who preferred anonymity confirmed to The Eastern Updates that their petrol price stood at N126,000 and did not say if the price may drop in the coming days following Dangote’s gantry price drop and crude oil price decline.
Speaking to Newsmen on the development, the National President of the Petroleum Products Retail Outlets Owners Association of Nigeria, Billy Gillis-Harry, said filling stations may adjust their fuel price downward from now to Friday.
“An adjustment may come from now to Friday since Dangote refinery cut gantry price to N1,075 per liter today,” he told Newsmen.
Read Also: Dangote Fertilizer Wins Big As Iran War Cuts Global Supply
Meanwhile, there are reports that Dangote Refinery has suspended gantry petrol sales since Sunday, a development that may make Tuesday’s gantry price drop ineffective.
The Eastern Updates reports that after a N396 per liter gantry fuel price hike in the last ten days, Dangote Refinery reduced its petrol price by N100 to N1,075 per liter on Tuesday.
Tuesday’s 650,000-barrel-per-day gantry petrol price drop followed declining global crude oil prices after United States President Donald Trump signaled an end to the Iran war.
Africa’s largest granulated urea producer, Dangote Fertilizer, is emerging as one of the unintended beneficiaries of the US-Israel war against Iran, as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has removed roughly one-third of globally traded fertilizer from active supply chains just as Northern Hemisphere farmers race to secure inputs for the spring planting season.
Dangote Fertilizer’s vice president Devakumar Edwin told Bloomberg on Monday that demand for the Lagos-based plant’s output had surged as buyers scrambled to replace volumes lost from Gulf producers.
“Demand has gone up substantially due to the shortage in the global market,” Edwin said. The plant, which sits entirely outside the Hormuz disruption zone on Nigeria’s Atlantic coast, was uniquely positioned to absorb demand from buyers in Europe, the Americas, and Asia who could no longer source from their usual Middle East suppliers.
About 33 percent of the world’s fertilizers, including sulfur and ammonia, travel through the Strait of Hormuz, according to trade analysis firm Kpler. The Middle East powers about 40 percent of global urea exports and 20 percent of global ammonia exports, much of which originates behind the strait, according to Tommaso Pellegrinelli, a senior research analyst at Wood Mackenzie. That export capacity is being “held hostage in the area” due to the standstill in the strait.
QatarEnergy — the world’s second-largest LNG producer and operator of Ras Laffan, the world’s largest single-site urea plant — halted urea, ammonia, and methanol production after Iranian drone strikes on its facilities disrupted the natural gas feedstock required to run the plant. Kuwait also curtailed output. Saudi Arabia’s eastern port fertilizer volumes, estimated by Kpler at close to 14 million tonnes annually, were effectively frozen.
Dry bulk transits through the Strait of Hormuz are down 91 percent, with approximately 280 bulkers trapped in the region. Cape of Good Hope rerouting — the only viable alternative for vessels unwilling to risk Hormuz transit — adds roughly $1 million per voyage in fuel costs and weeks of additional transit time, threatening temperature-sensitive ingredient shipments. For fertilizer specifically, the timing could not be worse.
“It’s a mess because it’s spring,” said Cedric Benoist, who farms wheat, barley, and other crops south of Paris. “This situation can’t continue.” Northern Hemisphere spring planting — the period when fertilizer demand peaks globally — was already underway when the war began on February 28, meaning farmers had limited time to adjust sourcing strategies before field preparation deadlines passed.
Chet Edinger, who farms corn and soybeans near Mitchell, South Dakota, rushed to secure a last few truckloads of urea for his tens of thousands of acres on the morning the war broke out.
“We grabbed what we needed,” he said. It cost 22 percent more than late last year — “the highest price I ever had to pay.” The American Farm Bureau Federation warned that if farmers were unable to obtain remaining supplies in time, the US could see reductions or shifts in planted acreage and lower yields, affecting food security and the affordability of essential goods. Senior economist Veronica Nigh at the Fertilizer Institute estimated that almost 30 percent of global ammonia production was “either involved or at risk in this conflict,” with the figure rising to 50 percent for urea.
Dangote Fertilizer’s position outside the conflict zone gives it a structural advantage that no amount of operational efficiency could replicate. Changing where fertilizer is produced cannot happen overnight — the system’s dependency on cheap Gulf natural gas feedstock, built over decades of capital investment, cannot be replicated in months or years. Dangote’s plant, which runs on Nigerian natural gas from the Niger Delta, is entirely insulated from the feedstock disruptions hammering Gulf producers. Its proximity to the Atlantic and direct shipping access to US East Coast, European, and Latin American ports mean it bypasses the Hormuz bottleneck altogether. Approximately 37 percent of its output is already exported to the United States, a market share that Edwin indicated was likely to grow as American buyers sought to replace volumes previously sourced from Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Read Also: Iran War Pushes Dangote Petrol Above Import Cost
The plant has an annual production capacity of approximately three million tonnes of granulated urea and ammonia — a figure that makes it Africa’s largest fertilizer producer but represents only a fraction of the global shortfall created by the Hormuz closure. India, which buys more than 40 percent of its urea and phosphatic fertilizers from the Middle East, was among the most exposed major buyers, with three Indian plants forced to reduce urea output as LNG supplies from Qatar dropped sharply. In the upper Midwest of the United States, fertilizer supplies were in relatively good shape, with Mosaic and CHS reporting 85 to 90 percent of product already warehoused, with more rail cars in transit — though both companies acknowledged the last of the urea supplies could be a tough lift if the strait remained closed through April.
Group founder Aliko Dangote had previously stated his ambition to challenge Qatar for the position of the world’s leading urea exporter within four years. The war has compressed that timeline’s competitive logic without requiring any additional investment. In August 2025, Dangote signed a $2.5 billion agreement with the Ethiopian government to build a fertilizer plant in the country’s Somali region — an expansion that would extend the group’s Atlantic-facing supply footprint deeper into East Africa and provide additional production capacity that would, if built on schedule, come online precisely as global fertilizer trade was being forced to structurally reorganize around the Hormuz crisis and its aftermath.
