Billionaire Dangote hires Spanish firm for Ethiopia plant

Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote’s Dangote Group has hired Spain’s Técnicas Reunidas SA to supply two hydrogen reformers for the fertiliser complex it is building in Ethiopia, a project whose cost has risen to more than $4 billion.

The Madrid-based engineering company said on Wednesday it will design, buy materials for, manufacture and ship the two units for the ammonia and urea plant at Gode, in Ethiopia’s Somali region. The reformers will together produce more than 200,000 normal cubic meters of hydrogen an hour and must be delivered within 18 months. Técnicas Reunidas did not disclose the value of the contract.

The work will be done by TR-Technical, the company’s heat-transfer equipment unit. Topsoe, the Danish company that develops ammonia, hydrogen and catalyst technology, is licensing the process.

Reformers are the first step in making nitrogen fertiliser. They break natural gas down to release hydrogen, which is combined with nitrogen from the air to make ammonia and then turned into urea, the most widely used fertiliser in the world. The Gode plant is designed to produce 3 million tonnes of urea a year.

A bigger project

Dangote and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed launched construction at Gode in October 2025, two months after the Dangote Group signed a shareholders’ agreement with Ethiopian Investment Holdings, the state’s sovereign wealth fund. The Dangote Group owns 60% of the venture and the Ethiopian fund holds 40%.

The project was first priced at $2.5 billion. In May, during a visit to the site with Abiy, Dangote raised the planned investment to more than $4 billion as the scope grew to include a 110-kilometer gas pipeline, a 120-megawatt power plant, a packaging plant for polypropylene bags and a blending plant able to make 2 million tonnes a year of NPK fertiliser. The original schedule gave the builders 40 months, which points to completion in early 2029, and officials have said they want to finish sooner.

Gas for the plant will come from the Calub field in the Ogaden basin, which has sat largely undeveloped for decades. China’s GCL Group signed a 25-year agreement in March to supply it.

Ethiopia imports almost all of its fertiliser, and the government expects the plant to save foreign currency and lift farm output. Dangote has said the plant could also supply neighboring countries in East Africa, and has called Ethiopia his group’s second-largest investment destination after Nigeria.

Listing plan

Earlier this month in Addis Ababa, Dangote said he plans to sell at least 10% of the Ethiopian venture to local investors on the Ethiopian Securities Exchange once production stabilizes. He has not set a date or price for the sale.

He wants to lift the group’s fertiliser capacity to 12 million tonnes a year by adding a second 3 million-tonne line at Gode and another 6 million tonnes in Nigeria, where Dangote Fertiliser already runs a 3 million-tonne urea plant near Lagos.

The contract adds to a growing African business for Técnicas Reunidas. The company, which has about 14,000 employees and says it has completed more than 2,600 projects in over 70 countries, recently won an engineering services contract for a large green hydrogen plant in South Africa.

Dangote, Africa’s richest person, built his fortune in cement, sugar and flour before moving into fertiliser and oil refining. His refinery near Lagos closed a $1.6 billion initial public offering on Oct. 27 that drew investors from 120 countries.