16 November 2016, Sweetcrude, Abuja – The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, has harped on the need to improve on Nigeria’s proven gas reserves of 192 trillion cubic feet, TCF.
The corporation said there was need to increase the reserves as the current reserves could only support the country’s power sector and guarantee supply for Liquefied Natural Gas, LNG, for only 36 years.
Nigeria has its sight set on generating 20,000 megawatts, MW, of power from the next few years while annual growth in LNG production has been projected at 64 -metric tonne.
NNPC’s Group Managing Director, Dr. Maikanti Baru, made these revelations in an address at the recent 13th annual conference and exhibition of the Nigerian Gas Association, NGA, in Abuja.
“The gas reserves in Nigeria currently stand at 192TCF. With the demand growth we will witness a sharp decline in reserve unless something is done to arrest the decline,” said Baru.
He added: “With 22MTPA of LNG and about 3GW of thermal power generation, the reserve of 192TCF could only last for 65 years. However, if we consider the growth case of 64MTPA of LNG and 20GW of thermal power generation capacity, the reserve of 192TCF will only last for 36years. The message is, we need to launch an aggressive exploration campaign.”
According to him, Nigeria should immediately develop new gas sources to meet up with the challenges presented by this situation.
Maintaining that developing new gas sources was possible, he referred to a US Department of Energy prediction that Nigeria’s gas reserves could reach as high as 600TCF
“The US department of energy indicated that with enhanced exploration activities Nigeria’s reserve could reach 600TCF. Consequently an aggressive exploration campaign will have to be launched to discover more gas to meet the envisaged demand,” he said.
Baru disclosed that there were several gas acreage distributions that the country could embark on to quickly grow its reserves base and that the acreages were up to 209 in number and scattered across the Benue Trough, Anambra Basin and others.
“To increase our reserve therefore, we need to expand the areas for exploration for gas. The frontier basins need to be explored more aggressively. These basins include the Chad basin (40 blocks), Benue Trough (41 blocks), Anambra Basin (12 blocks), Sokoto Basin (28 blocks), Bida (17 blocks) and Dahomey (37 blocks).
“The Niger Delta (34 blocks) also needs to be explored further. There are about 200 oil and gas open acreages for allocation across different terrain in the country,” he added.
