As the Federal Government is set to launch the Autogas policy Tuesday this week, a consortium of banks has mobilised about N1 trillion to support the activities of the National Gas Expansion Program (NGEP) which is the promoter of Autogas, Liquefied Petroleum Gas( LPG), Compressed Natural Gas ( CNG), and Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) in the country as an alternative fuel to petrol.
The focus of the program is to ensure the maximum utilisation of gas within the domestic economy as an alternative to Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) or petrol.
The contribution is the outcome of the meeting the bankers had with the committee on the programme after being made to see the viability of the project.
Chairman, National Gas Expansion Program (NGEP)Chairman of the programme, Mohammed M Ibrahim who disclosed this said that the efforts of his team have started yielding fruits with a company like Eleme Petrochemical Company in Port Harcourt now producing polymer raisin that can be used to produce a gas cylinder.
He said as the programme progresses, the country would now have multi-fuel stations where there would dispensing pumps for Compressed Natural Gas, Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), Liquefied Natural Gas, and electric charging points.
He disclosed that the committee has stopped the importation of cylinders into the country and encouraged local companies to start the production, stating that the committee worked to get the raw material locally from Eleme Petrochemicals. So that jobs could be created for providing Nigerians.
“If we have allowed importation some local companies would have shot down. There was an offer for 50million polymer cylinders to be dumped into the country, but we refused, also there was an offer from South Africa which we turned down. Let our companies in this country manufacture the cylinders”, he said.
The committee he stated declined the offer by Indorama to produce Polymer Raisin because it wants other companies to produce the cylinders to avoid monopoly.
By March 2021 there would be about a million Polymer cylinders in the market, he said.
He said they want the private sector to own the gas programme for the purpose of sustainability. He said programme would succeed because no government would want to buy petrol from a place like Niger for N400 per litre and bring it to Nigeria at N170 per litre.
He stated that the current state of the CNG program was not what was intended by the government which initiated the project when it was brought on board in 1999, but the subsequent government came and abandoned it, that is why there are just about 5600 vehicles that have been converted. Those governments that came after the Olusegun Obasanjo government were interested in importing fuel. That is why there has not been any serious alternative to petrol in the last 12 years.
