In order to tackle the challenges of gas flaring in Nigeria, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC Ltd) is to ensure that any proposed project without clear-cut plans to commercialise or use up its associated gas would no longer be approved.
The NNPC Group Managing Director, Malam Mele Kyari said that gas utilisation was a major priority of both the Federal Government and the NNPC as efforts were on to build infrastructure to replace the current fuel oil and diesel in the nation’s factories with gas, which is a cleaner source of energy.
Kyari, who spoke at the recently concluded Nigerian International Energy Summit (NIES 2022) in Abuja, said that the trend was in tandem with the global reality of energy transition.
He, however, stressed that Nigeria needed all the hydrocarbon of today to build the energy of tomorrow.
In his keynote message, the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Chief Timipre Sylva said that his Ministry was ready to provide the needed framework and support for seamless energy transition in the country.
Former Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr Ibe Kachikwu, who was also at the summit, said focusing on fast-tracking oil production, in-country refining, developing funding stream and leveraging the Petroleum Industry Act were some of the solutions to the industry’s current challenges.
He advised that gas should be seen as transition fuel with estimated life span of 20 years, adding that industry players should begin to look at alternative sources of energy such as solar and wind to catch up with the world before 2060.
Other panelists included the Managing Directors of Chevron, Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria and Exxon Mobil as well as the Deputy Managing Director of Total Energies and the General Manager of Nigeria LNG expressed commitment to the Nigerian government’s energy transition aspiration, while indicating their willingness to partner with NNPC for better business opportunities.
At the CEO Roundtable session with the sub-theme: “Strategies for Confronting the Energy Transition”, Kyari said that a key strategy to tackle the energy transition challenge was to beef up investment in the development of physical infrastructure.
This, he said, would get electricity to end users across every part of the country.
‘We know that in this country, anything less than 30,000 to 40,000 megawatts of electricity cannot serve this country adequately.
‘The population is growing, the middle class is growing, in fact, their energy requirement is very different; rural-urban migration is at its peak.
‘This means that you need more and more infrastructure on ground to close that gap.
‘So, we need to be much more productive, industrial growth must be accelerated, infrastructure must be put in place in the short term to grow the economy to a level where we can generate enough revenue to close energy poverty gap.
‘We must answer the electricity question in the country’, Kyari said.
