The Nigeria Liquefied Petroleum Gas Association (NLPGA) has pushed for agreement on gas regulations that will encourage home use and the switch to liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), often known as cooking gas.
Nuhu Yakubu, the association’s president, stressed the importance of reaching an agreement, particularly for national gas policies that can highlight opportunities in the LPG industry and ease the full switch to LPG, at the association’s annual conference and exhibition with the theme “Energising the Future: LPG as a sustainable fuel in African Economies.”
Going by its interventions in the domestic market as well as the production and supply prospects from its most recent start of the LNG Train 7 project, he claims that NLNG’s LPG supply intervention remains Nigeria’s most important domestic energy policy.
He explained that NLNG’s dedicated vessel made supplies to all of its authorized domestic receiving ports in Nigeria in order to maintain a continuous supply of goods.
The company recently declared that it will produce all of its LPG exclusively for the domestic market and will start delivering propane there starting in 2021.
Olusegun Obasanjo, a former president, also urged participants in the liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) subsector to put Nigeria’s interests first.
According to Obasanjo, the home market has the most potential to become the world’s fastest-growing LPG market.
There are obstacles, though, and I’m urging everyone involved to work together to overcome them. These include, but are not limited to, increasing volumes from other domestic producers to meet the constantly increasing demand/supply, developing infrastructure to help supply reach the last mile, and the problem of regulations like VAT, among others, that make affordability by the average person a challenge,” the former leader said.
He urged other oil and gas majors to continue their efforts and consider ways to grow the domestic liquefied petroleum gas sector as a means to show respect to a nation from which they have greatly benefited.
Obasanjo recalled that during a courtesy visit, the NLPGA leadership made a reference to the part his administration played in encouraging LPG use in the home market to become what it is now.
Obasanjo claimed that the Nigerian Gas Master Plan was viewed by the government he led as a major interventionist idea to revive the gas industry from its essentially dormant status in 2006 and bring it into a market-based system with willing sellers and willing buyers, realizing the sector’s full potential for the good of all Nigerians.
He also revealed that the goal of the strategy was to intervene to set a minimum level of supply. The groundwork for a fully competitive market is anticipated to have been built above this point, he added, and market forces would then drive the market’s expansion in terms of supply and demand.
He basically argued that the domestic supply intervention policy was a transitory policy measure designed to raise supply availability in the short term to a point where it could sustainably support a fully competitive gas market.
The National Gas Expansion Program (NGEP) Chairman, Dr. Mohammed Ibrahim, identified key enablers for rapid gas development, including enabling policies, energy pricing and costing, industry structure, market rules, ease of doing business, consumer demand, among others, in his presentation on “Gas Expansion Program in Nigeria: Opportunities and Challenges.”
