Nigeria Will Require Over $15bn Investments To Meet Demand For Domestic Gas Market- Kyari

HOUSTON: Nigeria will require total investments of between $10bn and $15bn in the next two to three years to effectively meet the demand at the domestic gas market, the Group Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company, Mele Kyari has said.

Kyari said this on Tuesday at the 2024 edition of CERAWeek by S&P Global holding in Houston, the United States.

CERAWeek 2024, which is being attended by over 8,000 delegates, 1,400 speakers from 85 countries has as its theme, ‘Multidimensional Energy Transition: Markets, climate, technology and geopolitics.’

The conference is growing as the energy industry expands to include cleaner technologies as demand for climate solutions grows.

The drive for energy transition is reshaping the competitive landscape for companies and countries – creating new opportunities and risks across the energy value chain.

The imperative to reduce emissions has grown in urgency. Yet expectations of a simple linear global transition have been shaken as climate goals compete with concerns over how to deliver economic growth while ensuring energy security, energy access, and affordability.

The push for energy transition is reshaping the energy landscape by creating new opportunities and risks across developed and emerging economies.

Nigeria has chosen gas as its transition fuel and the federal government has set a deadline of 2060 to achieve that target.

Speaking at the Leadership Dialogue session chaired by Vice Chairman, S&P Global, Daniel Yergin, the NNPCL Boss said the current focus of the NNPCL is to build the necessary capacity to deliver gas into domestic market.

He said while the National Oil Company understands that the world needs gas, it must work with the realization that there is a clear connection between energy availability, sufficiency and development of gas in the country.

Kyari said, “We are actually a gas country with associated oil and many people don’t realize this. But we have more gas than oil equivalent and that means our focus is to see how we can use gas to provide the alternative that we need.

“I understand the ongoing conversations around energy transition, but what we are trying to sort out is actually resolving the issue of energy availability and the cheapest route in our context is to develop gas into the domestic market and that we provide replacement fuel before you really worry about something else.”

He told participants at the event that the NNPCL is working on a number of initiatives to meet the domestic demand for gas and to also take advantage of the exports market.

According to him, the NNPCL is working on building more LPG plants, adding that the Company is beginning to see more opportunities in the gas sector that were hitherto not visible ten years ago.

This, he added has made the NNPCL to focus on building a number of pipelines and networks of trunk lines that will supply gas within its network.

Kyari said, “Our focus is on gas for domestic market, and then of course, a number of initiatives that are going on to see how we can build new LNG plants and many of them are at developmental stage, but clearly within sight.

“We see clear opportunity that gas has today which were not there maybe 10 years ago. Today, we are building a number of pipelines and networks of trunk lines that will supply gas within our network.

“And building the infrastructure means that people can actually now produce the gas or put into our network and this synergy is working and perhaps, within the next three, four years, I’m sure that that we will have clearly in country, gas infrastructure.

When asked the scale of investments needed to achieve the NNPC objective to boost gas supply, Kyari replied, “What we see is that probably we will need between $10bn to $15bn in two to three years.

“That should cover the immediate gap. And of course, looking beyond providing gas in the domestic market, which is to see how relationships, partnership can create gas for export.

Beyond meeting the demand for domestic gas market, he said that an incremental investment of between $10bn and $12bn would also be required in the short term to create opportunity for growth after the initial $15bn.