Africa needs a peculiar kind of energy transition, rather than a global quest for a transition away from oil and gas, the Group Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC) Limited, Mele Kyari, has said. |
Kyari was speaking during a Leadership Dialogue Session on Tuesday at the CERAWeek Conference in Houston, Texas, just as the Chief Executive Officer of Saudi Aramco, Amin Nasser, said the current global quest for energy transition away from oil and gas was unrealistic.
Energy transition, the NNPC GCEO argued, was a very complex subject for most countries, especially in sub-saharan Africa, as a result of their peculiar geographical situations, conditions and circumstances.
African countries, Kyari pointed out, were dealing with peculiar situations bordering on strategies to harness energy resources to ensure availability to the people, and not a transition away from oil and gas.
He said energy availability for Africa was closely associated with attempts to mobilise available energy resources to achieve energy security for the people.
“The world has seen all the challenges thrown up recently by geopolitical events. It is clear that before energy transition, countries must first attain security of energy supply in their countries. You cannot talk about energy security when it is not even available,” Kyari said.
In most sub-Saharan African countries, he said more than 70 percent of the population were contending with the challenge of lack of access to clean energy for domestic chores, adding that the major concern of these countries was how to first fill the supply gap.
Although there were discussions about deploying renewable energy alternatives to bridge the energy transition gap, Kyari said a major setback has been finding the finance to fund renewable projects.
“If you insist on completing substitution today, then you have to deal with the problem of supply. For Africa, the transition must be differentiated. Even if Africa decides to switch off its fossil fuels, it will not make any difference to the global situation, as this only accounts for just about 3% of the entire global emissions,” the NNPC Ltd Chief noted.
For Nigeria and the NNPC Ltd., he said the focus was how to strategise and build capacity to deliver natural gas to the domestic market and beyond.
As a gas-endowed country, he said Nigeria must utilize its abundant gas resources to provide the needed alternative source of fuel for the people.
“We understand the arguments towards attaining energy transition. But the cheapest way to achieve that is through natural gas. We see clear opportunities that gas creates. Today we are building a number of trunklines and other gas infrastructure that will supply gas to a number of gas networks within and outside Nigeria,” Kyari said.
In particular, Kyari said there was an ongoing initiative on the Nigeria-Morocco Gas Pipeline Project (NMGP), which, he said, was at an advanced stage of completion, to create a pipeline that would traverse at least 13 African countries to thw European market.
He announced that the Final Investment Decision (FID) for the $25bn project was scheduled for December, 2024.
Reputed to be Africa’s largest oil and gas company and corporate entity in Africa, he said the NNPC Ltd was intrinsically critical to Nigeria’s resource management and economic development.
On efforts to reposition the NNPC to deliver on its roles, Kyari said the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) 2021 has reformed Nigeria’s oil and gas industry, by ensuring that the company operated as a fully commercial entity that was not only accountable and responsible to its shareholders, but also a quoted profit-oriented entity on the Nigerian stock exchange.
On efforts to tackle the menace of crude oil theft, he said the government was making joint efforts with private security agencies to restore the nation’s crude oil production capacity.
“Ït is an abnormal situation, but it is well within control. We were able to recover some of our production and build back confidence so that investors can bring in their money. We are also doing global advocacy to governments and institutions, because stolen oil has to be taken to the market,” he stated.
The theme of the 2024 CERAWeek organised by S&P Global energy conference was “Multidimensional Energy Transition: Markets, Climate, Technology and Geopolitics.”
Meanwhile, in his presentation, the Chief Executive of one of the world’s largest oil companies, Saudi Aramco, Amin Nasser said rather than the world phasing out oil and gas in the global energy mix, attention should shift towards reducing global emissions to the environment.
Nasser who noted the global quest for energy transition was already showing signs of failure, said policymakers should do away with the “fantasy” of phasing out oil and gas, as demand for fossil fuels was expected to continue to grow in the coming years.
“In the real world, the current transition strategy is visibly failing on most fronts as it collides with five hard realities,” Nasser said.
“A transition strategy reset is urgently needed and my proposal is this: We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas and instead invest in them adequately reflecting realistic demand assumptions,” the CEO said.
Nasser said alternative energy supply sources have been unable to displace hydrocarbons at scale, despite huge investments over the past two decades..