Nigerians generate 2,500MW from diesel, petrol, kerosene – NNPC

Nigerian households and businesses generate 2,500 megawatts of electricity from petrol, kerosene and Automotive Gas Oil (AGO, popularly known as diesel), according to an analysis by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).

Speaking at a special session in the recently concluded 2015 Nigeria Oil and Gas (NOG) Conference in Abuja, NNPC’s Group Executive Director in charge of Gas and Power, Dr. David Ige said power supply shortage had become a strain on Nigeria’s economic growth and industry competitiveness.

According to him, NNPC’s studies indicate that over 90 per cent of businesses in Nigeria rely on back-up power generation for about 60 per cent of their power needs.

On the theme of the session, “Interrogate our roadmap in gas-to-power: Assessing if we are on course to maximising our potentials,” Ige said gas-to-power or lack of it had become the recurring theme in annual conference.

“Therefore increasing power supply, clearly, will unlock Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth and create jobs. It is estimated that the direct impact of closing the power gap we have today is well over $11 billion and the indirect impact is significantly more than that with additional benefit of over one million jobs a year. So, this challenge of power outage clearly needs to be overcome,” he said.

Ige stated that an analysis by the NNPC shows that apart from the 3,500 megawatts of power from the grid, additional 2,500 megawatts is generated through back-up generation.

“Today, on top of the grid power that is consumed, Nigerians on a daily basis consume about 12 million litres of diesel. Our estimate is that about 50 per cent or 60 per cent of that goes to power generation and the balance of that into trucking. If you estimate that in terms of megawatts, that translates to close to 1,000 megawatts from diesel generation,” Ige said.
Ige also stated that the NNPC had done similar studies on petrol, adding that 20 per cent of the 40 million litres of petrol consumed in Nigeria daily is used for power generation.

According to him, petrol is used to generate about 800 megawatts of electricity by Nigerians.
“Of course, a lot of people use kerosene, usually for lantern and cooking. We have estimated that that comes to about 500 megawatts of electricity. So, if we put all those together, about 2,500 megawatts is being generated from diesel, kerosene and petrol,” he added.
He noted that gas and power sector in the last two years have been going through significant reforms, adding however, that gas supply has been a bottleneck in the efforts to ensure reliable power supply.

Ige also stated that safe and adequate supply of gas requires reformed gas sector.
Earlier in his speech, the Minister of Power, Prof. Chinedu Nebo said gas accounted for 80 per cent of power generation in Nigeria, while hyrdo is responsible for 20 per cent.

According to him, there is enough gas to give Nigerians 5,500 megawatts of electricity if the pipelines are not blasted by vandals.