By Iyabo Adebisi
Federal Government has launched the Presidential CNG Initiative, P-CNGi, in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital.
The P-CNGi is a component of the palliative intervention of the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration directed at providing succour to the masses occasioned by the transitive hardships of the fuel subsidy removal policy of the federal government.
To cut the cost of transportation nationwide, the federal government came up with the CNG idea which is the conversion of petrol and diesel-powered vehicles to compressed natural gas, CNG.
Speaking at the launch, President Bola Tinubu who spoke through the Chief Executive Officer and Programme Director of the Presidential Compressed Natural Gas Initiative (P-CNGi), Michael Oluwagbemi, emphasized that Nigeria has gas that could last over 100 years.
He urged commercial transport owners to key into the scheme by bringing their vehicles to be converted, stressing that the use of CNG would reduce the cost of transportation by over 40 per cent.
President Tinubu lamented that the nation has been depending on imported and subsidised petroleum products, putting the growth and economy of the nation in the hands of third-party nations.
He said, “Nigeria as a nation has continued to pay for expensive PMS and diesel that is not only dangerous to our health but also our finances, the better way is for us to use what we have that is cleaner, cheaper, safer and more reliable”.
“This natural gas is everywhere across the nation, 30 out of 36 states in Nigeria has natural gas reserves, we have enough gas reserves to last us for more than 100 years as one of the largest gas reserve nations in the world and ranked as number one in Africa.”
“And to translate these gas reserves either for transportation, fuelling generators or our industries, it is far simpler than building a refinery.
“Dangote Refinery is about 650,000 barrels processing capacity per day which translates to about 100 million liters of petrol per day, this is equivalent to about 36 million vehicles, if you are to power 36 million CNG vehicles, you won’t need the footprint of Dangote Refinery, so, to get PMS is not only expensive but time and space consuming endeavour, and that is what makes PMS expensive”.
“With all these natural blessings, why would Nigerians live beside the ocean and be washing their hands with slit? Why would we have these bountiful gas resouces which is easier to produce, cheaper on our pocket and cleaner for our environment and safer and not make good use of it?”.
“If you get to petrol tanker accident, nine out of ten leads to an explosion, but in the case of CNG, one out of ten leads to explosion, CNG is eight times less explosive than diesel, 18 times less explosive than petrol.” President Tinubu noted
The president said the federal government would soon develop a CNG Industrial Park for the nation to develop its tools for CNG conversion instead of importing from developed countries adding that the government would mobilize the engineers and technicians to boost the gas sector.
Oyo State government representative, Chairman, Oyo State Pacesetter Transport, Dr Dikko Salami and conversion stakeholders including Adedayo Adebanji, and Engineer Tunde Onakoya called for mass sensitization, policy implementation on CNG compliance to drive the initiative.
The conversion partners also urged the federal government to provide an enabling environment for people to build refilling stations for the effectiveness of the CNG initiative.
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