Nigeria raises hope to end gas flaring by 2020

The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu, has renewed the Federal Government’s commitment to end gas flaring by 2020.
He gave the assurance in the monthly bulletin of Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and said that Nigeria’s desire was to end gas flaring, ten years ahead of the 2030 United Nations deadline on flare out.
According to him, Nigeria is about 70 per cent compliant on gas flare exit, and hopes to take away the other 30 per cent within the 2020 deadline.
Speaking on the gas policy, he said: “We are going to try and change our dynamics from being an oil producing country to being a gas producing country, because that is really what we are. Now we need to move from policies to directives.”
He reiterated that it was vital that, “we get people back; we will define what the oil policy is, define what gas policy is, and people can have some predictability in terms of the business they are doing, and you begin to see a lot of them come back.”
Kachikwu also identified the downstream as an area requiring urgent attention, in which a directive had been up and running by 2019.
He said many teams had been set up to deal with the issues, and that there was a lot of financing interest, adding that “infrastructure is a major gap in the oil industry in Nigeria, so we need to think outside of the box.”
Regarding the upstream, Kachikwu said that there were about three to four big projects, where the final investment decisions (FIDs) had been taken without giving further details, adding that it was just a matter of finding the funding and making a steady progress, thereafter.
He said that from the perspective of the Nigerian petroleum policy, which was all embracing, “we shown the structures of the industry. We have shown the business models that we are going to embrace to deal with environmental issues; that has been passed as far as up to the Council.”