Abuja — Despite owning the world's 9th largest reserves of natural gas, with over 209 Trillion Cubic Feet , Nigeria's global market share of exports has declined from 15 per cent to just 2 per cent in recent years, a former Group Executive Director, Gas & Power, at the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited , Dr David Ige, has disclosed.
Ige said:"On aggregate, we really haven't grown gas in the last seven years as a country. That's by virtue of our performance today. But let's even take the domestic market growth. We have grown at about 3 per cent. And the 3 per cent growth is evident also in the challenges of the pipeline. Because the pipeline is barely operating at a steady state, which is very symptomatic of a lack of supply basically to the system.
According to him, Nigeria should begin to look at how to move the sector forward in a big way, rather than focus too much on the little things that tend to bog it down, noting that while the country has a humongous amount of reserves, they are hardly ever accessible, unlike in the US where reserves accessibility is not a major challenge.
While it is good to invest in infrastructure, he argued that it must not be done in isolation of the benefits of the market because the market is what's going to drive its viability. Ige stressed that it wasn't just about scouting for foreign investment, but also looking at the cost of doing business.
" Now, where we are today, we are stuck in year one because we didn't move to that liberalised market. But the master plan was supposed to have moved there and to have done things to make that happen," he argued, stressing that the entire aspiration has been undermined by the power sector.
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