Nigeria’s deputy minister of petroleum resources, Emmanuel Ibeh Kachikwu, on Monday revealed plans of the African Petroleum Producers Organisation’s (APPO) plans to pull together about $2 billion investment fund that would drive collaborative operations by the organisation in achieving maximum growth in the oil and gas sector in the continent.
Kachikwu, who also doubles as the president, APPO, said the fund that would be pulled together by African Energy Investment Corporation was geared towards ensuring African countries manage huge opportunities associated with oil discoveries while also protecting the African oil and gas market.
He spoke on the theme “Africa on the Global Stage: International Collaboration, Opportunities and the Future.”
APPO is made up of 18-member oil producing countries, accounting for nearly 95 percent of Africa’s oil production and at least 13 percent of world production.
”We are presently looking at expanding the role of a particular financing body we are going to be calling the African Energy Investment Corporation. The whole idea is to mobilize between $1 billion and $2 billion of resources to fund all the essentials necessary for us to properly collaborate,” the minister said in his opening remarks at the ongoing International Petroleum Summit in Abuja.
The minister, who decried the inability of African countries to advance efficiently their oil and gas market for economic prosperity, said there was urgent need for African countries to collaborate and protect their own oil market through innovative driven researches and technology.
“Today, most African countries are silos, everybody does their own thing; you build your own refineries, plants, gas turbines, etc.
“If we could just cross the Rubicon and be able to extend hands of infrastructural relationship across Africa; build joint pipeline, plants and refineries; begin to protect the African market, we would have taken a huge step, not only in the development of Africa, but to the stabilization of independent countries,” he said.
According to Kachikwu, “Unless you get your policies right, unless you get your marketplace right; unless you get your collaborative mechanisms right and get your infrastructure right, you would face a huge amount of challenge in the competition for the very scarce resources and scarce capital.
”Africa, the time has come. Unless we protect our border posts, unless we begin to look more to the continent; unless we begin to look more to financing that we can find locally; unless we begin to look for African financial entities that would help us develop the key infrastructure that we need in this sector, we would have lost a huge opportunity.”
Also speaking in his remarks, Maikanti Baru, group managing director of NNPC, said at the conference that African countries need to collaborate on infrastructure to drive benefits in the oil and gas sector.
According to Baru, “Today, Nigeria and Morocco are collaborating to construct a gas pipeline that will traverse at least 15 West African countries and connect the existing Europe gas pipeline. The feasibility study has been concluded and the pre-FID greenfield optimization study is currently ongoing.
“This pipeline will help in the industrialization of these countries. It will also meet the needs of consumers for heating and other uses. We gas as a fuel to take Africa to the next level. New gas discoveries have been recorded offshore Senegal, Mauritania, Mozambique and are in various stages of development.”
Nigeria is also targeting to take FID on LNG Train 7 this year. So, African countries need to collaborate and trade among each other not only in terms of oil and gas but also in other key sectors so that the multiplier effect is seen across our various economies, he said.
