• Inaugurates first CNG installation facility in Lagos
The Chief Executive Officer of the Presidential CNG Initiative (Pi-CNG), Michael Oluwagbemi, has identified gas as a safe and reliable alternative energy for transportation challenges in Nigeria.
The Presidential CNG Initiative, a component of the palliative intervention of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration, inaugurated the first compressed natural gas (CNG) training and installation facility in Lagos.
The facility was built by Fixit45, a workshop for CNG conversion training and installation with technical support and collaboration with Mijo Autogas Pvt, India.
Speaking during the event, the Pi-CNG boss described the CNG landscape in the last six months as a demonstration of what can be achieved when government efforts are geared towards making life better for the people by enabling good policy.
“We are grateful to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu who has enabled us to set out on this journey that is now catalysing into the kind of change and development we are getting in the sector.”
He said that apart from inaugurating the facility, we have come to see some of the interesting things that Fixit45 is doing, to set Nigeria on the path of cleaner, safer, cheaper and more reliable sources of energy in the transportation sector.
According to him, “Nigeria is a gas country with the highest gas reserve in Africa, top seven in the world and yet, energy poor. The country is the second highest in terms of gas flaring after Russia. All across the Niger Delta, we continue to burn gas. In the last five years, we have burned the equivalent of about $12.5 billion. That is the very definition of waste.
“Indeed, since we have energy riches, gas being in 30 out of 36 Nigerian states, the reality is that the future of cleaner, safer and more reliable energy in the transportation sector can only be in the gas sector. So, when the president came in last year, he felt it was not genuine that the country so blessed like us, should still be experiencing energy poverty.
“Now and then we have a queue for PMS that we import and are equally subsidised. There is not just a shortage; there is massive smuggling of that resource that is supposedly subsidized. The money that should have been spent on roads, hospitals, and education is spent rather on subsidizing our neighbors who then enjoy cheap fuel to the detriment of Nigerians who suffer poor infrastructure because sufficient allocation of government resources does not go to those things that matter.
“The government and the President said no, this is no longer tenable. We cannot continue to subsidise poverty, import unemployment and export jobs while we remain energy-poor. To change the conversation, the President said it is time for Nigeria to depend on the natural gas that God blessed it with.
Oluwagbemi stated that the government is fully committed to the CNG programme.
“For workshops like Fixit45,” he explained, “We need at least 3,000 of them all across the country if we want to have this reliable, cheaper and cleaner future we are talking about. We need over 4,000 refueling stations.
“We require more than 400 to 500 major mother stations as well as LCNG plants to extend the current rate of CNG across the country. We need to invest in major transmission pipelines. We need to complete the AKK which is about a $4 billion project which NNPC is currently building and other gas projects. We need to connect a critical pipeline system to ensure gas moves across Nigeria.
“Some of these are ongoing while others have been completed to ensure that the country achieves its plan of having a million vehicles converted by 2027. So, we are excited to have the inauguration of the first CNG Training & Installation facility here in Lagos,’’ he said
