20 March 2013, Accra – Nigeria is to boost its power generation with 2 billion cubic feet of gas per day by 2015, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, Group Managing Director Andrew Yakubu has said.
Yakubu disclosed this at the Offshore West Africa Oil and Gas conference in Accra, Ghana, where he also disclosed that the country’s oil and gas production had been on the decline due to crude oil theft and severe flooding in the Niger Delta.
Represented by the Group General Manager of Corporate Audit, Isa Inuwa, Yakubu said future growth in power generation would continue to be gas-based as the nation aspires to attain a 40 megawatts, MW, generation capacity by 2020.
But, he said the NNPC was more concerned about boosting the country’s crude oil and gas production capacity.
He saidf: “Government’s focus on gas development and ensuring its availability for power generation is based on the firm belief that the spin-off effects of a reliable power supply would provide a solid base for industrialisation, leading to the provision of employment opportunity and attracting the much needed investment in the country.
“Government plans to build a Central Processing Facility (CPF) in Rivers State from which would come wet gas from wells, which would be processed into dry gas and natural gas”.
This, Yakubu said, involves the setting up of a world-class petrochemical plant with the capacity to produce 1.3 million tonnes of polyethylene and 400,000 tonnes of polyethylene yearly.
The NNPC boss stated that the government was envisaging that from this plant, myriad secondary industries would be developed.
