The new head of Nigeria’s state-run oil firm NNPC said on Monday he would create a “war room” to resolve the gas shortage problem plaguing the OPEC member’s power plants.
Shehu Ladan, NNPC’s general managing director appointed by Acting President Goodluck Jonathan last week, said Nigeria needed to build much needed gas and power infrastructure to take advantage of its vast energy reserves.
Africa’s most populous country has the world’s seventh largest natural gas reserves estimated at 180 trillion cubic feet, but most Nigerians go without mains electricity for weeks.
Nigeria’s power crisis is considered to be one of the main brakes on economic growth.
“We will create a war room for gas supply,” Ladan told his NNPC colleagues in his first address as chief. “The way we are operating the gas sector now is disjointed.”
He said many of the country’s power plants do not have feeder pipelines to use domestic gas supplies.
Nigeria expects total gas demand to grow by more than 20 percent each year, reaching 10 billion cubic feet per day by 2015 from around 500 million in 2000.
Nigeria has invited foreign oil companies to help explore and develop its gas reserves, but insisted any investment must first focus on delivering the natural resource to its 160 million residents.