Honeywell brings industrial AI to Nigeria’s Dangote refinery

Africa’s biggest refinery is getting an AI upgrade. Honeywell said on 26 October that it is launching an industrial artificial intelligence platform, Forge Plant Cognition, at the Dangote refinery in Lekki, Lagos, Reuters reported.

The system draws on technology from Nvidia and Dell Technologies and is designed to help run complex plants more productively and profitably.

What it might be worth

Honeywell said early data suggests the platform could deliver benefits of more than 29 US cents per barrel at Lekki, or around $60 million a year in gross benefits if the refinery runs at full capacity.

Reuters was careful to note that those figures are preliminary and not guaranteed. They depend on the plant running flat out, so they are best read as a target rather than money in the bank.

A growing partnership

The deal deepens an existing relationship. Honeywell is already helping Dangote expand the refinery’s capacity to 1.4 million barrels per day by 2028, and it has been chosen to help build a proposed mega-refinery in Kenya’s Lamu County.

Whether the AI delivers will only be clear once it has been running for a while. But it is one of the more concrete examples yet of AI being put to work in African heavy industry.

Related reporting: World Bank taps Cassava and Nvidia to help governments share AI computing power.