From fossils to renewable, weighing up Nigeria’s economy (2)

Sunny Nwachukwu, PhD, a pure and applied chemist with an MBA in management, is an Onitsha based industrialist, a fellow of ICCON, and vice president, finance, Onitsha Chamber of Commerce. He can be reached on  +234 803 318 2105 (text only) or schubltd@yahoo.com

The nation’s economy, in search of suitable strategic roadmap for economic growth, through the energy sector market and the already existing petroleum business, can leverage the great opportunities hidden in the globally agreed multilateral pact of combating Climate Change. This should be taken up as a task by promising economies (like Nigeria, for instance); with prompting from the resolutions recently reached at the latest global gathering (COP26 Summit/Climate Change Conference at Glasgow, Scotland), to combat global warming.

Among the three resolutions reached on climate change action was to cut methane gas emissions by 30 percent before 2030. Nigeria, through President Muhammadu Buhari, however, gave a totally different timeframe, 2060. That means, after another 30 years of the generally accepted year, 2030.

This, to my mind, can become a ‘project-initiative’ for the newly registered NNPC Limited, through its upstream activities, under the purview of the Regulatory Commission. Viewed purely from an attractive perspective as a ‘business initiative’, its full compliance could be considered as one of the measures to be served on oil producing companies operating in the upstream sub-sector; even while the world, generally, continues to engage in combating the climate crisis that is threatening the planet.

The national oil company (as it currently still is, until it undertakes an initial public offering), NNPC Limited, at a time like this, could focus real hard and effectively implement the methane gas emissions control pact, in keeping with its fiscal framework; with strong oversight from the Upstream Regulatory Commission, which is in charge of all upstream activities as enshrined in the Petroleum Industry Act. In other words, the Commission can direct  the attention of the oil producing companies (immediately after the COP26 Summit) towards trapping and harvesting the highly volatile, lone-carbon, saturated hydrocarbon compound, methane gas, from escaping. They can then channel it for the purpose of its economic uses, supplying the same to offtakers within and outside the economy, including to service the likes of the gigantic Dangote Refinery and Petrochemicals plant (currently getting ready to go on stream), for methanol and fertiliser production.

In such a scenario, the known annual production capacity of polyethylene and polypropylene granules by the Dangote plant alone, of about 900,000 metric tonnes, would be engaging a reasonably significant amount of the harvested volatile gas, methane (that is creating the global environmental crisis through carbon emissions, resulting in global warming), into a more meaningful economic use.

There are, therefore, numerous windows of opportunities to fully develop a petrochemicals industrialised economy in Nigeria. This is achievable if the NNPC Limited, in collaboration with the federal government agency in charge of investment promotion within the economy, Nigerian Investment Promotion Council, teams up with the organised private sector (OPS), in the likes of chambers of commerce in all the major cities through their national body, Nigeria Association of Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture (NACCIMA); and also, the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN). The members of these organisations, who also are captains of industry in their respective sectoral operations, have international business partners that the government can develop an investment programme to attract their foreign capital into the economy. This template is a sure and easy way to achieve results, by the OPS bodies through trade missions, wooing their strategic foreign partners or customers to locate or establish manufacturing of their mutual goods of interest in Nigeria.

This idea, if generally applied by most oil producing countries (especially developing countries),  could also lead to other forms of petrochemicals being manufactured in commercial quantities (applicable through diverse, realistic and practically achievable routes in organic chemistry), since methane gas is a primary, universal feedstock for numerous semi-finished petrochemicals. There are known diverse methods of general syntheses that could be applied commercially.

This initiative should easily open up other possible avenues of massive commercial utilisation of the harvested methane gas than allowing it to escape into the atmosphere and wreak more environmental havoc.

Another green solutions management measures being applied in mitigating global warming and the numerous other environmental challenges the people and nature are facing presently is the transition to renewable energy technology. This energy transition process, migrating from fossil fuels to renewable energies, is a sustainable development action that could conserve this planet’s ecosystem by stopping and reversing the already devastated biosphere and the original habitats to status quo, through energy solutions that are sourced from recyclable natural resources (hydro, solar, wind).

From the economic point of energy costs, they are meant to be affordable (over time) but, Nigeria’s economy still needs to reap and exploit the hidden wealth deposited in the abundant hydrocarbon deposits within her shores, to a reasonable extent for her prosperity (so long as the crude oil and natural gas resources are still in demand as sources of fuel for consumption). No wonder at the COP26 Summit, while nations were keying into a timeframe of 2030, Buhari pronounced Nigeria’s target as 2060, to totally cut methane gas emissions to the expected net-zero, resilient future.