or Petroleum Resources, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu, said
The Minister of State
for Petroleum Resources, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu, said on Thursday that the Federal
Government
webapex.net was working assiduously to ensure installation of gas filling plants
in each of the 774 Local Government Areas in the country.
Kachikwu disclosed this
in his keynote address at the commissioning of the Nigerian Army Welfare
Limited Guaranty Gas plant at Mambilla Barracks, Abuja.
He said: “We are working
with the Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) companies producing cylinders, with very
strong presidentially backed incentives to enable them to produce LPG cylinders
in this country.
“About four of them are
getting fac
westernmagazine.org ilities from the Nigerian Content Development Monitoring Board
(NCDMB) from the more than 200 million facilities we have.
“They are getting import
exemption f
ysin.org or materials to be assembled for the plants.
“Once you do that, you
also expect them to assemble them around the more than 700 local government
areas in the country.
“We are targeting that.
“In the next one or two
years, every local government area will have gas filling plants.”
He added that cylinders
produced by the companies would be distributed free to consumers as part of
efforts at encouraging local consumption in the country.
According to him, the
government is also planning to optimize the country’s vast resources through
the virtual gas pipeline system.
Already, the Nigerian
National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has signed a contract with a private firm
for the activation of the virtual gas pipeline network for power generation.
The project, which will
be facilitated through the installation of Mini-LNG plants, is designed to
supply, in the first instance, about 84 million standard cubic feet of gas per
day (mmscf/d) by transporting gas from production fields using customized
cryogenic tankers to areas not easily accessible through pipelines.
This is coming at a time
that Nigeria’s current proven gas reserve is about 202 trillion cubic feet
(TCF), up from the initial figure of 199TCF with a potential for up to 600TCF
in undiscovered resources.
A virtual gas pipeline
is the use of specialized trucks to take products from production centers to
destinations in the hinterland.
The minister added that
efforts were made for the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) to have
regulations that would make every filling station operate a gas filling point.
He said that if the more
than 10,000 filling stations in the country were to have a gas filling pump, it
would go a long way toward helping to achieve the LPG penetration drive of the
government.
“It will help to move
from current 5,000 megawatts to 7,000 megawatts, but targeting about 14,000
megawatts.
“Gas is an essential
element for us to achieve that,” he said
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