Bitumen at Lomé: West Africa's Transit Hub

The largest destination for Turkish bitumen in the world, most of it moving on

Türkiye declared 368,397 tonnes of bitumen exports to Togo in 2025, a quarter of everything it shipped and more than it sent to Belgium, France or the United States. Togo itself declared only 112,631 tonnes of imports that year (Türkiye 51 per cent, Greece 49 per cent) and 34,193 tonnes of re-exports to Nigeria, Gabon, Senegal, Cameroon, Guinea and Liberia at about USD 485 per tonne. The gap — roughly 250,000 tonnes a year — is product that enters Lomé's bonded storage and leaves by road for Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger without appearing in Togolese trade statistics. Lomé is, in other words, a distribution point for a region, not a market of 8 million people.

CBIL brokers penetration 60/70 and 50/70 and oxidised grades into Lomé and the neighbouring ports in new steel drums and in bulk, on CFR or CIF terms with inspection at filling and the refinery named on the certificate of origin. The buyers on this coast are storage operators and traders who serve the Sahel, Nigerian and Ghanaian importers and emulsion plants, and the road contractors working the corridor programmes. Declared landed values at Lomé ran at USD 467 to 505 per tonne in 2024–25, which sets the level any competing origin has to meet. We work from a buyer's grade, quantity, basis and timing, and we quote only against those.

Need the ship as well? Our chartering desk prices bitumen tanker and drummed bitumen freight on LaycanDesk.