By George Onah
Port Harcourt—The inadequate supply of gas to the thermal power stations in the country, representing more than 85 percent of the national electricity generation output, is capable of undermining the massive investment on generation, transmission and distribution facilities, an economist, Mr. Friday Udoh, has said.
Udoh, who is an expert on gas supply chain, said the Federal Government’s handicap in this direction was on the verge of derailing the realization of the government’s target of 6000MW electricity generation capacity within the next two months as it promised.
Speaking to Vanguard in Port Harcourt yesterday, Udoh linked the inability of the Ministry of Power in improving the situation to the absence of coordination of functions among ministries, agencies and various tiers of government as well as ineffective deployment and application of measuring mechanism in the country’s policy framework.
He said several technology had been introduced for gas storage, such that Ukraine has 93.64 Bcf. storage working capacity, with anticipated facility expansion in meeting the official energy strategy storage capacity target of 247.35 Bcf. by the year 2030.
“Also, France has available working capacity of 406.36Bcf, Germany 685 Bcf. and U.K 155.47 Bcf. Equally, the United State of America possesses 139Bcf. with capacity of 8.644 Bcf/d deliveries.
“If these nations can have so much in preparation for any unforeseen occurrences, why can’t we start from somewhere in securing our future gas supply needs.
“Within our proliferating, politicised and weak institutions and regulatory environment, it is not out of place to experience insecurity in supply of natural gas in the country, coupled with unbalanced and non-reflection of experts and stakeholders’ opinions on various decision-making structures in the country.
“We stand to experience long term negative effect, especially as the country is opting for separate regulatory entities within the same sector. Except the government collapses the existing regulatory functions into a single regulatory organ shall we have solution,
“This is similar to the American and Spanish practices where power generation and hydrocarbon industries are regulated by a single entity, that is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for the Americans and the National Energy Commission for the Spanish,” he said.
The economists said the precarious situation would have been averted and should not have degenerated to this extent had the bill to unbundle the Nigerian Gas Company, subsidiary of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, been given adequate attention since its introduction in 2006.
“Right now, international oil companies extracting gas, NGC and NNPC are answerable to the Minister of Energy, then what miracle do we expect of the Minister of Power to perform, when there exists virtually no coordinating structure on ground among the two ministries? And it must be understood that gas and power cannot be separated,” he said.
May God save us from these empty promises. when it was obvious that the dead line for the generation of 6000 megawatt can not be met, federal government and its agency continued deceiving us. form the beginning i knew n they are not going to do anything, it is just their business as usual. May the help and give us the God sent that we deliver this country.
Is it not militants that is responsible for them not meeting the 6000megawatt by december deadline again?
Is it not militants that is responsible for them not meeting the 6000megawatt deadline again?
We the average Nigerians do not want any more use of long grammars and
bombastic phraseology to deny us power supply by December.
Let somebody in the present administration do something special to put
smile on the faces of those who voted you in where you are, who trusted you
and believed that you are there for their on well being. The paradigm of lack of
sufficient gas supply means the promise of power supply by the Federal
Government will derail the realisation of the nations expectation to have
power supply soon. Many vital institutions and technical stations don’t work.
Is there something working properly at present in nigeria? If you know one, mension it. We Nigerians knew that all these 600MW promises are just empty promises.
I am still waiting for what our civil society and NLC will do about power and other social life of nigerians before its completely collaspe.
It had been obvious right from the middle of the year that the 6000 megawatts of electricity by December this year was a myth. Government has been preparing our mind to accept their failure. Minister of Energy said recently that we are almost at the point of generationg the 6000MW. God know what standard of measurement he uses to measure a megawatt. The populace will know when we generate the said amount of energy when the provision of electricity to households, factories and offices improves.
I agree most developed nations have gas storage capabilities, however this would not resolve the current problem. The last administration and thus one knew that there was in sufficient gas supply to meet the promised power, however they were in ti much of a rush to place orders for turbines and receive their kick back to consider the implications. It had never been possible to produce the power promised simply because there is and never has been enough gas to do so. The sector needs ti be de regulated and has prices brought in line with international prices to attract the investment required to develope the infrastructure to feed the power plants. This is not new, everyone knew this before buying the power plants but if they spoke up then they would not get the kick back the orders would mean. Same thing for the new paralel pipeline to be a back up for ELP, NGC have ignored the findings of experts and placed an order for an onshore line, this was done without due process and there is a lot of rich NGC directors