Ike Amos
30 January 2019, Sweetcrude, Lagos — Former Chairman of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, NERC, Mr. Ransome Owan, and other experts have blamed lack of commitment for the inability of the country to tackle the issue of gas flaring.
The pioneer NERC chairman and the experts made this assertion in Abuja at the Nigeria International Petroleum Summit, NIPS.
Owan disclosed that gas flare persists in Nigeria because as a country, we had not made a commitment to ending the infraction.
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He noted that a major factor promoting gas flaring was the absence of the requisite infrastructure to harvest gas in most of the oil fields in the country.
Owan added that Nigeria had not been able to effectively utilize the West African Gas Pipeline to evacuate gas to Ghana and other countries along the pipeline.
He argued that this might negatively affect the country’s quest to supply gas to Europe through the proposed Nigerian-Morocco gas pipeline project.
Speaking in the same vein, Mr. Dayo Adeshina, Programme Manager, National Liquefied Petroleum Gas Expansion Plan, lamented that there was a huge disparity in LPG supply in Nigeria.
According to him, the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas, NLNG presently supplies LPG to three main terminals in Lagos, while the majority of LPG consumed in the country was transported to remote locations through roads by trucks.
He called for the setting up of the necessary infrastructure to deepen LPG penetration across the country, thereby, promoting gas utilisation.
On the contrary, Chief Operating Officer, Gas, and Power of the NNPC, Mr. Saidu Mohammed, argued that gas producers and pipeline operators are committed to ending gas flaring by boosting gas supply.
Specifically, he noted that on an average basis, the NNPC supplies about 3.6 billion standard cubic feet SCF, of gas daily to the NLNG, while it supplies about 1.3 billion SCF of gas to the domestic market daily, which would sometimes be utilised and sometimes ignored.
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He said, “The liquidity issues of the Nigerian power sector is affecting everybody. The problem with the gas industry is the domestic market. The NLNG is doing well with gas and everybody down the chain in that line of business is happy.
“To address this challenge, I am of the view that everyone should commit to contracts. It is becoming increasingly difficult for some buyers to abide by contractual terms in the domestic market and this should be addressed. Commitment to contract is what is moving the NLNG forward.”
