*139 gas flaring sites located across country
OpeOluwani Akintayo
28 July 2018, Sweetcrude, Lagos — The Department of Petroleum Resources, DPR, has said Nigeria has the potential to generate 300 megawatts of electricity from its current gas being flared in the country.
Olawoleola Ogunsola of Gas Monitoring & Regulation, Department of Petroleum Resources, DPR, revealed this to SweetcrudeReports on the sideline of a workshop organised for energy reporters in Lagos on Friday.
The country currently commercialises 11 percent of its gas production; the rest is flared.
According to him, if the government is able to harness gas currently being flared at the 139 flare locations across the country, it will boast of 300MW of electricity in the nearest future.
He explained that solution to gas flaring challenge is for government to construct pipelines which will harness all gas currently being flared into one position for commercialisation.
To this end, he explained that government’s current Nigerian Gas Flare Commercialisation, NGFC programme, is geared towards finding markets for gas flared in the country.
“We made a mistake with the programme in the past because we allocated flare cites to companies without both technical and financial capacity to harness them, however, things have changed because DPR is now making sure those who get the allocation have everything it takes to take the gas into the market for sale,” he said.
He added that now, the government will be responsible for finding a market for gas currently being flared unlike in the past when it was left in the hands of producers.
“Another reason the programme hasn’t been successful is because government left gas flaring commercialisation in the hands of the producers who don’t have much interest in gas, however, now, we will take our destiny in our own hands and coordinate the market by ourselves,” he said.