According to Dr. David Ige, the former Group Executive Director for Gas and Power at the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC), Nigeria’s proportion of worldwide gas exports decreased from 15% to 2%.
He claims that although though Nigeria possesses over 209 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of natural gas reserves, ranking ninth in the world, its export market share has decreased recently from 15 percent to just 2 percent.
Speaking on a panel at the gas colloquium hosted by Babalakin & Co. in Abuja, Ige emphasised that, eighteen years after its inception, Nigeria’s much-discussed gas master plan, which aimed to increase supply and production of the commodity, was still in its phase one.
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Ige, who currently serves as the CEO of Gas Invest Limited, said that between 2017 and 2023, Nigeria’s domestic gas market expanded by only 1.3 million cubic feet per day, or roughly 1.5 to 1.55 million CF, or approximately 3% annually. He also pointed out that the country’s gas exports had decreased.
Ige said: “On aggregate, we really haven’t grown gas in the last seven years as a country. That’s by virtue of our performance today. But let’s even take the domestic market growth. We have grown at about 3 percent. And the 3 percent growth is evident also in the challenges of the pipeline. Because the pipeline is barely operating at a steady state, which is very symptomatic of a lack of supply basically to the system.
“So all of these point to a generally low level of investment in Nigeria, regardless of what we have done in the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) or in everything else. The key point is the PIA is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to attract investment. And I think that’s very important because we focus so much on the PIA.
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“It’s a law. But there’s a whole plethora of things that actually make investments to happen. And it’s important that we get all those together. With 210 TCF of gas, Nigeria should be operating in a slightly different frame from countries that operate one project at a time. So we need to take this very holistically because we spend too much time talking about our 210 TCF.
“I think it’s time we start talking about how much of that gas is actually working for us. Now, in the US, between 2017 and 2023, just the export component of the US market grew from zero to 12 BCF and growing steadily. That’s on a compounded basis of about 37 to 40 percent year-on-year, compared with our 3 percent or less in Nigeria.”
He said that instead of concentrating too much on the small issues that slow down the sector, Nigeria should start looking at how to advance it significantly. The country has enormous reserves, but they are rarely accessible, in contrast to the US, where this is not a significant problem.
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He continued, “Nigeria has a lot of reserves, but they’re not accessible. I remember when we did the gas master plan many years ago, one of the slides we put together broke down the reserves of the country, the ones that are stranded, the ones that are accessible.
“There’s a lot of gas reserves in Nigeria that are actually stranded, either in the hands of independents who are fighting each other, or they’re in the hands of International Oil Companies (IOCs), that are sitting on the assets. They’re not developing them, but they’re not able to access them,” he argued.
“Our biggest competitor in Europe is the US. Our market share in energy has dropped from 15 per cent to 2 per cent globally over the last couple of years. And probably going further down,” he added.
Ige stressed that it wasn’t just about scouting for foreign investment, but also looking at the cost of doing business.
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