Obasanjo reveals that he had plans to get 50% of Nigeria's vehicles to run on natural gas

FORMER president Chief Olusegun Obasanjo has revealed that he planned to introduce vehicle running on natural gas during his tenure in office as part of a plan to reduce the nation's dependency on petrol.

 

Despite Nigeria being the world's sixth largest crude oil exporter, she is still a major petrol importer because her three main refineries are not working to capacity. This often leads to lengthy queues at petrol stations and the federal government has to regularly import petrol at a huge cost to cope with the shortages.

 

Speaking yesterday, while receiving a delegation of the management of Nipco at his Presidential Hilltop residence in Abeokuta, Ogun State, Chief Obasanjo said that he gave out licences to companies in a bid to achieve his goal. He added that if his plan had worked, by now, about 50% of the vehicles in the country should be running on gas.

 

In 2006, the Obasanjo administration gave out licences to Nipco, Contact Global and Global Steel, for the development of Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) for vehicles. However, only Nipco, which later went into a partnership with the Nigeria Gas Company to form Green Gas, had invested significantly in the project since then.

 

Venkataraman Venkatapathy, the managing director of Nipco, said: “To replace 20% of the current petrol consumption of Nigeria, the natural gas required is less than 5% of the total domestic gas consumed currently and less than one per cent of the current gas production. Foreign exchange saved will be close to $2bn.”

 

He added that in Benin City, the Edo State capital, over 4,000 vehicles run on the CNG which resulted in replacing 20m litres of petrol from 2012 to 2015 and forex savings of over $9m. According to Mr Venkatapathy, Green Gas had developed nine operational CNG stations, with three completed and five under construction.

 

A former special assistant on petroleum resources to President Obasanjo, Dr Muhammed Ibrahim, who was on the Nipco team, added: “I was one of the team members when president Obasanjo was in office in 2006 that initiated the full concept of development of gas for vehicles and other applications in the country. It was during his regime that President Obasanjo awarded three licences to three companies to invest in the promotion and diffusion of CNG for vehicular application in the country."

 

He added that because of the capital-intensive and high-tech nature of the project, only one company has invested millions of dollars in the project such that the entire Benin City is encircled with a network of gas pipelines with about seven CNG gas stations. According to Dr Ibrahim, the company had constructed the largest CNG station on the African continent in Ibafo in Ogun State.