Vice President Yemi Osinbajo stated that Nigeria’s transition from fossil fuel to natural gas could be affected by the European Union and the World Bank’s decision to defund natural gas.
This was disclosed on Thursday at a virtual meeting of the Africa Regional Heads of Government Commonwealth headed by the Prince of Wales.
Osinbajo said that Nigeria’s transition to renewable energy would see petrol replaced by Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) and Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG).
He said, “We also have our natural gas expansion programme, this is where we are using Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) and Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) in order to replace the use of petrol, and this is going on now; we are actually trying to fit and retrofit existing petrol stations so that the use of cleaner fossil fuels will replace it.
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“This brings me to the questions around a just transition to net-zero emissions. And a just transition in our view is one where gas, for those who are from producing countries, as fossil fuel is still supported, especially for those of us in this part of the world that have vast deposits of the resource. Natural gas is accepted more or less as a transition fuel, the bridge to renewable energy.
“Of course, natural gas is accepted as a transition fuel. But unfortunately, what we are seeing is the move towards defunding of natural gas projects by the EU, and the World Bank has also been indicating that natural gas projects would be defunded. Now, this obviously would put countries such as ours in a very dire situation and make the transition extremely difficult for us. What we are focused on trying to do is to ensure that our gas projects replace coal and fuels.”
Also present at the meeting were the presidents of other African countries including Botswana, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and Gambia.
