By Adedapo Adesanya
The Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC), Mr Mele Kyari, says despite popular belief, Nigeria is not an oil-dependent economy.
He made this disclosure while speaking at the opening session of the Atlantic Council Global Energy Forum in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE), in relation to the achievement of the net-zero target by the year 2060.
Mr Kyari stated that presently, the contribution of the sector to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was just nine per cent.
“First of all, let me put it in a general context, our country’s GDP contribution from oil and gas is just nine per cent. So, we are not really an oil-dependent economy.
“Secondly, the US Bureau of Statistics has estimated that by the year 2047, Nigeria’s population will be around 379 million people and will be the third most populous country in the world.
“The combination of this is that you have a very rapidly growing population with a huge gap in terms of energy accessibility and you have a huge economic disparity between the poor and the rich and this is growing.
“There is no way you can take the context of energy transition out of this, but our country is clearly committed to net-zero by 2060 to reduce our carbon footprint in a manner that will contribute to net-zero by 2060,” he said.
Mr Kyari stressed that while Nigeria was trying to move its dependence on thermal sources of power to other sources of energy, more than 70 per cent of the energy needed was currently coming from the source.
“And most of them are not even coming from gas, so most of them are coming from fuel oil and other dirtier fuels,” he said.
He added: “What we are going to do is some kind of replacement so that we will move from the dirtier fuels to cleaner fuels which is gas, and therefore our focus is to see gas as a transition fuel.”
According to him, what Nigeria had tried to do in recent years was to build its gas infrastructure to ensure it is able to supply gas to the domestic market and also export it to the international market.
He explained that the energy poverty that Nigeria was confronted with, was also true of other African countries.
“Therefore, we are trying to see how we can build a network of pipelines and infrastructure that will deliver gas throughout the West African region and potentially into Europe through Morocco and Algeria.
“We are a 306 trillion cubic feet gas nation and this is enough to cover a lot of our needs in Africa, but our people still use charcoal as cooking fuel and that’s the lowest fuel that you can put forward,” he stressed.
Dipo Olowookere