Huge Fuel Subsidy: Aregbesola Advocates Conversion To Gas Powered Vehicles In Nigeria

The Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola, has advised Nigeria to emulate Egypt by converting vehicles running on petrol and diesel to gas powered engines to save the country the huge amount of fund being wasted as fuel subsidy every year.

Although Nigeria is one of the leading oil-producing countries in the world, it depends on imported refined fuels for its local consumption and the country has come under heavy burden of subsidy in recent times.

Speaking on how Nigeria could stop paying trillions of naira on fuel subsidy every year, the minister said in a speech he delivered at the book launch of an energy expert, Dr Yunus Akintunde, that converting all commercial vehicles in the country to gas powered would save the country a huge cost which he said could be spent on other sectors.

The speech was made available to THE WHISTLER on Tuesday.

The minister, who said he saw how Egyptians , especially those in Cairo converted their old Renault and Peugeot vehicles to gas-powered, stated that it would take less than one week to teach mechanics in Nigeria how to convert petrol and diesel vehicles to gas- using ones.

Aregbesola said, “Automakers have been working hard to produce fuel efficient vehicles, with each edition an improvement on the previous, but have now begun a transition to electric vehicles altogether.

” In the next 20 years, no new internal combustion engine vehicles will be produced. A lot of effort is also going on to produce electric airplanes, especially powered by solar energy.

“But quite disappointingly, this concern has not been shared much in Nigeria as our addiction to cheap petroleum fuel appears insatiable. Most of our systems are still dependent on petrol and diesel driving demand crazily for them, with the attendant consequences.

“But we can learn a little bit from Egypt where its commercial vehicles, particularly the taxis are powered by gas. These are the old Peugeot and Renault cars that are no longer in use in Nigeria and other parts of the world, but which have been converted to use gas and still being used because they are well maintained.

“It is high time we borrowed from this. If all our commercial vehicles run on gas, a large chunk of the demand for petrol and diesel will drop. The mechanics will take less than a week to learn how to do the conversion and in six months, all commercial vehicles would have gone through the transition.

“This will reduce the cost of transportation, especially for the masses that patronize public transport systems.”

He also said Nigeria needed to start working seriously on how to generate alternative sources of power from the sun, the wind and other renewable sources to address its electricity problem.