Abiy and Dangote Announce a 120-Kilometre Fuel Pipeline From Damerjog to Dewele

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, Djibouti's President Ismail Omar Guelleh and Aliko Dangote announced on Thursday the construction of a refined petroleum pipeline connecting Damerjog in Djibouti to Dewele on the Ethiopian border, a distance Fana Television puts at about 120 kilometres.

The project is to be implemented by a consortium of Ethiopian Investment Holdings and the Dangote Group, with fuel storage terminals at both ends — offshore receiving and storage at Damerjog, connected to domestic storage and distribution inside Ethiopia. The Prime Minister said it will cut logistics costs and delays, strengthen energy security and make the Ethiopia–Djibouti trade route faster and more sustainable.

The number that decides whether this works

Ethiopia imports effectively all of its refined fuel, and essentially all of it lands at Djibouti and moves inland by road. Every litre currently pays for a truck, a driver, a return trip and the queue at the corridor.

A pipeline removes that cost and replaces it with a tariff. Whether the country is better off depends entirely on the gap between the two, and the tariff has not been published. A pipeline built at private cost and recovered through a throughput charge can easily land above the trucking rate for the first decade — that is how most pipelines are financed.

The second variable is volume commitment. Storage terminals at both ends imply take-or-pay: someone on the Ethiopian side will be contracted to move a minimum quantity whether or not demand is there. That obligation is the real fiscal exposure, not the capital cost.

Where it sits regionally

The announcement lands the same week Kenya said it will break ground on a 17-billion-dollar refinery at Lamu on 30 September, a project its government expects to be East Africa's largest refining facility. Two corridors are being built toward the same inland market at once. Ethiopia is the demand both are counting on.

Open

No capital cost, financing structure, tariff, construction timetable or completion date has been announced, and the split between Ethiopian Investment Holdings and Dangote Group in the consortium has not been disclosed. Nobody has said whether the pipeline will be open access or dedicated, what happens to the trucking fleet on the corridor, or whether the 120-kilometre figure covers the full route or only the cross-border section.

The Amharic announcements underlying this report reach fact.et through machine translation and the figures above are reported as announced.

Sources: Fana Television, 24 September 2026, Fana Television, 24 September 2026, Tikvah Ethiopia, 24 September 2026, Birr Metrics, 23 September 2026