It’s 7 pm in Lagos, the sun has set and many of the city’s five million cars are on the move, filling the streets with fumes. Shortly afterwards the national grid cuts out. Millions of diesel generators rumble to life and the smog thickens.

Otonye Iworima, a former professional triple jumper, wants to close her windows so she can breathe easily but it’s still sweltering, more than 30 degrees. She is battling to control allergic reactions to the pollution that can trigger recurring throat infections and bouts of pneumonia.

“The generator is very close to my window and it blows into my room where I sleep,” said the former athlete, who now helps run a clean air campaign.

“There’s a lot of exhaust fumes. It can be terrible.”

Iworima, who credits her silver medal at the 2006 Commonwealth Games with the decision to train outside the city, says her family all have illnesses linked by scientists to ‘particulate matter’, the deadly mix of soot and sulphurous material produced by burning fuels.

Inhaling it increases the risk of pulmonary embolisms, cancer, heart attacks, lung disease, infertility and premature births. Her brother has been hospitalised several times with asthma attacks. Her sister, also an asthmatic, died of a pulmonary embolism this year. 

One reason high-sulphur fuels are choking Lagos, Africa’s most populous city, is that they are banned in Europe. Refiners there split crude oil into a range of products: The cleaner ones are sold locally. The dross is exported.

Laboratory-tested petrol samples taken by SourceMaterial from pumps in downtown Lagos had sulphur levels of up to 800 parts per million—eighty times higher than the legal limit in Europe and North America.

A SourceMaterial investigation found that one in six barrels of petrol shipped to Nigeria in the past year came from a single blending unit in Antwerp, Belgium, producing high-sulphur “African-quality fuel”. Some industry insiders have another, more derogatory term for it: “jungle juice”.

Two-fifths of the products blended at Antwerp were from the UK. The biggest exporters were two refineries in Immingham in Lincolnshire, owned by Prax and Phillips 66, and one owned by Essar Oil at Ellesmere port in the North West.

Leftovers from refining petrol for local consumption tend to be high in impurities like sulphur and poisonous heavy metals. Often they are so toxic they “can’t be blended” to meet European standards, says a former Immingham worker who spoke on condition of anonymity and described seeing exports with sulphur as high as 10,000 parts per million—a thousand times the legal limit in the UK, US and EU.

“It’s horrible stuff,” he said. “It can’t be blended to the UK specification, so what they do is they ship it to west Africa. It enables refiners to maintain a high profit margin. It’s a loophole, where essentially they can sell their waste product.”

A spokesman for Prax said the company “abides by industry regulations and practices” and complies with the law wherever it operates. Phillips 66 and Essar did not respond to requests for comment.

‘SHARP PRACTICE’

Exporting high-sulphur fuel is not illegal. But it’s “pretty sharp practice”, says Martin Blunt, who researches oil markets at Imperial College London.

“Refiners would have to pay to remove the sulphur, so a much cheaper way of doing it is to take a fuel with a medium sulphur content and create a low-sulphur fuel and a high-sulphur fuel, and sell them into different markets,” he said.

Two European states, Belgium and the Netherlands, have now capped sulphur levels in exported fuel. But refiners and traders rapidly adapt to find new ways to offload their dirtiest and cheapest products. 

Analysis by Data Desk suggests that wherever a ban has come into force, consignments have been quickly rerouted by traders, including the biggest shippers of oil products, Trafigura and Vitol.

Only high-level bans in the EU and UK can stem the flow of dirty fuel to Africa, said Oliver Classen of Public Eye, a Swiss campaign group that first investigated the trade in 2016.

“The profits from sending dirty fuels for West Africa are based on systematic regulatory arbitrage by commodity traders,” he said. “It needs an EU-wide ban to eventually ensure cleaner air in Nigeria and its neighbouring countries.”

The ongoing trade in dirty fuels shows the need for a “European framework” to tackle the problem, said Kathleen Van Brempt, a Belgian MEP.

Until then, suppliers will continue to meet the demand, said a buyer for Vitol, the world’s largest independent energy trader, who also spoke on condition of anonymity.

“You’re blending to whatever the country’s specifications are,” he said. “If someone asks for water, you don’t give them champagne.”

A Trafigura spokeswoman said the company ensures the products it supplies “meet required contractual and legal specifications for each jurisdiction”.

A spokeswoman for Vitol said: “Only the government and regulatory authorities of a given market can determine what fuel is consumed in that market, so only they can be held responsible.”

At Immingham, an estuary port just north of Grimsby, tankers creep along the horizon and a biting North Sea wind blasts the towers of two of the UK’s major oil refineries: Lindsey, owned by British company Prax, and Humber, owned by Phillips 66 in the US. 

Both mainly process oil from one offshore field, Grane, midway between Norway and the Orkney Islands. ‘Grane Blend’ typically contains sulphur levels of between 6,000 and 8,000 parts per million, according to industry data.

Refining converts crude oil into fuels that meet the UK’s 10 parts per million cap. But that leaves a residue high in sulphur and metals like manganese and nickel, as well as benzene, a dangerous compound linked with cancer. 

Much of it has wound up in Africa, according to data from Kpler, a trade intelligence platform.

Until May 2023, many of the UK refineries’ cargoes went to the Netherlands. When the Dutch government banned dirty fuels, exports shifted to Belgium.  

Between 2023 and this year, more than three million barrels of ‘CC’, or ‘catalytic cracked’, petrol and naphtha—grades usually associated with high sulphur—left the UK for Sea-Tank K700B, a blending unit in Antwerp. 

Millions of barrels of unlabeled oil products followed the same route. 

‘JUNGLE JUICE’

Data Desk and SourceMaterial analysed more than a thousand shipments in and out of the Antwerp unit—an array of 30 storage cylinders each the size of a 10-storey block of flats—between December 2022 and August this year. 

Sea Tank, a subsidiary of Sea Invest Corporation, is majority-owned by Belgian entrepreneur Philippe Van de Vyvere. The remainder is held by Cyprus-based Eminent Logistics, whose ultimate beneficiary is Valery Subbotin, a Russian citizen and a former director of oil giant Lukoil.

Of 507 inbound cargoes, almost two fifths came from the UK, mostly from Essar, Phillips 66 and Prax. Inside the Sea Tank, at least some has been mixed into what traders call “jungle juice”—fuel too toxic for European markets but sellable in Africa. 

One of the added ingredients is pyrolysis gasoline or pygas, a byproduct of ethylene production high in cancer-causing benzene, sources say. This year three pygas cargoes were delivered from Ras Lanuf in Libya to the tank. In Europe benzene in petrol is capped at one per cent; in many West African states, including Nigeria, the limit is higher.

More than half of the shipments leaving the Sea Tank went to Africa, mostly Nigeria, trade data shows. 

Information on buyers isn’t always available but most frequently listed is the Swiss trading giant Trafigura, which, according to Kpler, purchased at least 18 per cent of cargoes leaving Sea Tank, for which there was data. In all but four cases the grade was not listed. 

Trafigura’s spokeswoman said: “The sulphur content in fuel products in each country is not determined by refiners, traders or distributors—it is a matter for sovereign national governments.” 

Vitol’s spokeswoman said: “Only the Nigerian authorities can determine the specification of the fuel used in Nigeria. If one supplier ceases to deliver, another, possibly from another region, will step in.”

This autumn Belgium introduced its own export restrictions on dirty fuel and shipments to the Sea Tank unit slowed. Immediately following Belgium’s ban, a UK fuel cargo of catalytic cracked gasoline arrived at Ventspils in Latvia, which has its own “Africa-grade” blending tank owned by Vitol.

Other cargoes are moving through Barcelona, a recipient of pygas cargoes from Libya’s Ras Lanuf refinery. 

Shipments of petrol ingredients to Nigeria from Spain reached more than five million barrels by October this year, more than triple 2023. 

Rather than waiting for Brussels to take action, Nigeria last month introduced a stricter sulphur limit of 50 parts per million. 

But change is slow, says Ademola Adigun, an adviser to Nigeria’s petroleum regulator. The new refinery also complained this month that low-quality imports are undercutting its prices.

“The sulphur cap hasn’t been enforced because of the cost,” he said. “Most people couldn’t afford it at the pump. So it means imported fuel can still be between 500 to 1,000 parts per million.”

European nations could be breaking international law by allowing businesses to export dirty fuels, said Baskut Tuncak, the UN’s former special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, citing the 1998 Bamako Convention, signed in by 17 African countries including Nigeria. 

“Exporting companies and states have a responsibility to prevent the export of hazardous substances,” he said. 

Even if Nigeria is successful in freeing itself of the most toxic imports, consignments will simply reroute to other African states unless governments act, says the Vitol trader. Five African states including Egypt, the continent’s second-biggest economy, permit diesel with 5,000 parts per million sulphur. Ten more African countries allow 2,000 parts per million.

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“Nobody wants to send high-sulphur material. But the economics of it is the reason why that still happens,” the trader said. “The solution to all this is government policy. It’s government policy that drives prices.”

Meanwhile, Ayomide Jones, another Lagos runner, still finds it hard to breathe.

“I’ve stopped running in the evening when there is traffic in the city, because after the run I feel sick” she says. “We are just killing each other because of the lack of policy and regulation.”

This article was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe.