Martins Odion often has no electricity, but he says his home is permanently lit at night by the flames of waste gas being “flared” near his hometown in Nigeria’s Delta State.
“This flare site makes the nights like days,” said 42-year-old Odion, his eyes both bloodshot and milky, something he said his doctor attributes to the burning of the waste gas.
After sunset, nearly 200 blinking flares dot the landscape around Port Harcourt, the Delta oil hub. Experts say the gas that Nigeria flares nationwide could be worth billions of dollars if captured and transported to be used as liquefied natural gas for plastics or fertilizers.
To change this narrative, Carbon Limits Nigeria is bridging the shortfalls in Nigeria’s emission reduction with bold innovations, social investments, and local capacity development.
“What we are trying to achieve is to help energy industries to understand both the characteristics and size of carbon emissions and their operations and also help to reduce emissions. We also work on broader consultancy, which is related to analysing policies and regulations related to emissions of greenhouse gases,” Torleif Haugland, Co-Founder and Partner of Carbon Limits Nigeria said.
He added, “We facilitated investments and took part in projects that have achieved large emission reductions, millions of tonnes of CO2 in Nigeria.”
After announcing a 2060 net zero target at the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow, President Muhammadu Buhari signed into law a climate bill committing his government to produce a sweeping plan to reduce emissions, adapt to climate change and set annual and five-year carbon budgets.
Apart from the climate bill, Section 104(4) of the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) provides environmental remedy and relief to host communities affected by gas flaring. But what’s needed is a commitment to an environmental management plan that reduces the damaging practice in the Niger Delta.
Implementation of the PIA is set to commence in August 2022. Speedy attention to the tax incentive clauses for investors in gas processing is pivotal. This will support public-private partnerships to provide the infrastructure for efficient evacuation of gas with modern technology.
“From the point of scoping to the implementation, CLN has the technical skill to stay on project and the whole life cycle. There is no Nigerian company doing the kind of work we do,” James Ogunleye, Managing Director of Carbon Limits Nigeria said.
For most stakeholders, Carbon Limits Nigeria was not a name that rang a bell 10 years ago but the company is gradually rising from obscurity to arguably a major player in Nigeria’s energy sector.
As typical of emerging giants in the sector, the company is primarily focused on oil and gas emission; carbon and climate finance; biogas and waste to energy; carbon capture and storage among others.
“We have projects that have been registered within the power sector, the manufacturing industry, and even in the transport sector. Once these projects are implemented, the emission reduction will gain more momentum,” Ogunleye said.
He noted that one of the major challenges facing its operations is trying to get people to understand the language of climate change.
“We need to get to the place where, first of all, awareness is right, the capacity for people within the regulatory space is also right to understand how to look at issues within the climate change, and be able to decide what is right for us to do,” he explained.
The flaring of natural gas is a waste of a precious energy source. The gas could instead be processed to provide millions of Nigerians with electricity and cleaner power.
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