Nigeria has exported N1.2 trillion worth of low-quality gas in the last ten years, according to the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy.
According to the Punch, the report, which was co-published with KPMG, the country’s natural gas export, which was estimated to be 28 billion cubic meters in 2012, fell to 20 billion cubic meters in 2022, representing an 8 billion cubic meters loss in exports during that time.
The government announced that 2020 and beyond would be a Decade of Gas in an effort to boost domestic gas consumption and expand gas reserves by funding exploration efforts. This announcement coincides with the loss.
Hebrew Energy estimates that the value of one billion cubic meters of natural gas is approximately $183 million. The eight billion cubic metres of gas that Nigeria has lost over the past ten years add up to approximately $1.46 billion (or N1.2 billion, assuming an 802/$ exchange rate).
The news follows The Punch’s report from last week, which claimed that despite a N250 billion intervention fund provided by the Federal Government through the Central Bank of Nigeria, gas production fell last year.
According to a recent report, petrol flaring will cost the economy $16 trillion over the course of ten years.
An investigation into a N130 billion Compressed Natural Gas intervention fund involving 15 companies, including Dangote Oil Refinery, NIPCO Gas Ltd, NIPCO Plc, Hyde Energy Ltd, Lee Engineering and Construction Company, Pinnacle Oil and Gas FZE, and Transit Gas Ltd, was launched last week by the Senate Committee on Gas, which is chaired by Agom Jarigbe. The others are Gas Nexus Ltd., AP LPG Limited, Greenville Liquefied Natural Gas Company, First Modular Gas Systems Ltd., NOVAGAS Ltd., Almalgamated Oil Company Nig Ltd., and Delta State Government.
The Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria President, Chinedu Okoronkwo, bemoaned his organization’s members’ exclusion from the loan.
He claimed that if they were included in the loan, his members would have converted more than one million vehicles to CNG models by now.
“Not a single one of my members received any money. By now, many stations would have started their CNG conversion centers, and more than a million cars would have been converted if the right people had received the funds,” he claimed.
According to the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, as of August, Nigeria needed to spend $20 billion a year on gas expansion in order to complete the country’s gas infrastructure.
