The Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Petroleum Resources, Amb. Gabriel Aduda has reiterated the Federal Government’s commitment to ensure available funds for energy transition.
Aduda said this while speaking on ''Plans and Priorities for Nigeria’s Energy Mix'' at the on-going 2023 Nigeria Oil and Gas (NOG) Energy Week conference in Abuja. According to him, the government on its part has built policies around that and it is trying to incentivise the sector.
“We have put up in our own small way the CBN Gas Expansion Law and of course, several applications of cause and then we decided to slow down a bit.
“Yes, there were issues in the past year or so with accessing those laws, simply because CBN and the commercial banks were trading blames on who should bear the risk burden.
“ But I think we have gone past that now and we are at a stage where we think we can begin to effectively engage and see the disbursement of this fund.
“ But then there is also the need for us as government, to sit down and look at the entire value chain which is what we are doing now.
“The upstream, midstream, downstream, who fits into what and who must we fund to be able to keep the chain alive, such that there is no breakage or failure.’’Aduda said.
He noted that the good thing was that the gas was readily made available at affordable rates to the common man on the street.
He said: “we are beginning to look at that to say, if the funds have to go out, then they have to be purposely built and designed to fit into this value chain.
”The Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) 2021. PIA in its wisdom, by no means a perfect law, but we all agree that it is better than where we are coming from.
“ And there is no law you put in place that does not have its own teething problems. So we are here working around it.
“We are noticing the gaps, the challenges, and of course at forums like this we hear more what the industry player think and where they think we need to make adjustments,’’ he said.
He said that the medium Midstream- Downstream Gas Infrastructure Development Fund is clearly stipulated and set out in the PIA. He said the aim was to make funding available for incentivising that industry especially gas infrastructure development and associated gas projects.
“We are getting to that stage now where we either go with you in equity financing, or make facilities available for you to further push in the area of gas related projects.
“So permit me to challenge this gathering of experts to deliberate and come up with strategies that will further push us as a nation to be able to achieve sustainable funding,” he said.
Aduda said to go renewable, we need to build the solar motors using materials such as nickel, cobalt and to build batteries we need lithium.
”That means is that mining activities have to go up over 1,000 per cent for the world to be able to produce this equipment required to run the wind turbines ,to build the solar panels.
” So you are simply degrading, leaving the environment in one end and entering into degradation on another end.
” What plans are we putting in place to ensure that the mining of these resources are done efficiently and effectively and without harm?, he added.
The permanent secretary said it was easier to run on Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) than to be worried about building lithium batteries.
”If we must build the batteries, let the industries come to Africa rather than take the lithium away, build and bring them back.
”The only way we can have power is to have the industries here, then we will provide jobs, grow the economy and further expand the reach of power.
”So all these have to be an integrated mass. We can’t look at one in isolation of the other. So for us to achieve a sustainable energy transition, funding and technology are key''.