NLNG exec to lead NGA as consumers ask firm to raise off-takers number

By Ben Eguzozie

The Nigerian Gas Association (NGA), a body grouping of gas industry professionals responsible for lead advocacy, promotion and protection of the interest of the gas industry and players in the country, is repositioning for 2023-2024 with new executive members.

Aka Nwokedi, general counsel/company secretary of Nigeria LNG Limited (NLNG) and former managing director of NLNG Ship Management Limited (NSML), was elected as president, to lead the executive council and steer the affairs of the gas industry association for the next two years.

Next April 2023, the group would hold an international conference on the future of Nigeria’s yet unharnessed gas industry. Unfortunately, year-on-year, much of the associated natural gas in the country’s oil production is flared, without a concrete programme in place to commercialise the gas flares.

Since January to November this year, according to a report, none of Nigeria’s gas flare site projects have managed to come on stream. By November, the country flared natural gas in 178 sites valued at $685 million, according to the Nigerian Gas Flare Tracker, which operates a satellite-based technology for NOSDRA (National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency).

Since 2016, the federal government’s established Nigerian Gas Flare Commercialisation Programme (NGFCP), which planned to sell some 700 million standard cubic feet (scf) of gas, has yet to make any progress.

Nigeria, awash with huge gas deposits with proven reserves at 206.53 trillion cubic feet (tcf) valued at more than $803.4 trillion, is yet to institute gas commercial infrastructure. Scarcity of the product for industrial and domestic use is a national catchphrase.

As the newly elected Nwokedi-led NGA executive council plans to formally assume office during the association’s international conference in April next year, a gas consumer body, the Cooking Gas Consumers Association of Nigeria (CGCAN), has asked NLNG, a major gas liquefaction company, to expand off-takers licencing of its domestic gas, so as to curtail the rising cost of cooking gas in the country.

According to CGCAN, making space for more qualified liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) marketers as NLNG off-takers would enable cooking gas consumers in the country to access the product at affordable prices.

Hakeem Olajide, CGCAN president, lamented that it was unfortunate that Nigeria was a gas producing country, yet its citizens cannot find cooking gas unlike what obtains in other liquefied petroleum gas producing countries in the world.

Off-takers are those who are licensed by Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) to buy gas directly from NLNG and sell to petroleum gas marketers in the country.

He accused NLNG of continued licensing of some unqualified offtakers against the interest of qualified plant gas owners, who ought to be licenced and included as offtakers in order to make cooking gas available and affordable to Nigerians.

Olajide said as a result of the manner the selection of off-takers was carried out, it has largely contributed to scarcity of cooking gas in the country, with attendant exorbitant prices.

The domestic demand of LPG is put at above one million metric tonnes. NLNG has been pumping its domestic butane supplies to the local market, but this has not met the rising demand for the product.